Among the great pleasures of "Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea," the exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, is that visitors can get up close and personal with some of the masterworks on display. Instead of towering high on museum walls, viewers can come close enough to scrutinize a scattering of seeds beneath the Virgin's foot or the pattern on her head scarf.
Recently, Virginia Treanor, associate curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, took the time to discuss five images that merit intimate scrutiny:
•The show currently contains a sketch in ink by Michelangelo from around 1506 called "Study for the Head of the Madonna for the 'Doni Tondo'" in which the Virgin's face seems to coalesce almost imperceptibly from vapor and clouds.
A second Michelangelo drawing from around 1525, "Madonna and Child," is scheduled to join the exhibit in late January.
•Albrecht Durer's six resplendent woodcuts of scenes from Mary's life (taken from a series of 20 images) range from her birth to her coronation in heaven. Each is set in a busy social milieu — and each character in it seems to lead a full and independent existence. The woodcuts were created between 1502 and 1510.
•"Virgin and Child" by Elisabetta Sirani and "Madonna and Child" by Artemisia Gentileschi. The portraits by these two extraordinary artists hang side by side in the exhibit, and represent a Mary who has become fully humanized. In Sirani's vibrant 1663 painting, the Madonna wears a headdress similar to the covering worn at the time by women in the artist's hometown of Bologna, Italy. Gentileschi painted her fleshy young mother — barefoot and simply dressed — in 1609 or 1610.
•"The Death of the Virgin" by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1639. This etching was created at a time when the artist's wife had been ill, which may account for a strikingly realistic depiction of the ailing Madonna. Theologians debated whether Mary was alive or dead when she was taken up into heaven; the artist seems to be attempting to capture the precise moment when the Virgin hovered between both worlds.
•Sandro Botticelli's sublime "Madonna and Child," circa 1480, would have hinted to 15th-century viewers that the young mother had forebodings of her son's eventual suffering and death. Not only is Mary's expression pensive, but the painting is set at sunset and before a darkening sky. In case anyone missed the point, a later artist appears to have added a circlet of thorns around the infant Jesus' wrist.