There’s nothing meek or mild about childbirth: why have male artists sanitised the Virgin Mary?

How much do you know about the Virgin Mary? Go to any Catholic country, church, institution or European museum, and her image is inescapable – as the idealised, obeisant, chaste, beautiful woman. With her hands clasped together, or in the Madonna and Child pose, as queen of the heavens, or humbly sitting in nature, she is portrayed in blue, symbolising purity, full of piety in her wilfully subservient role.

The Virgin Mary is perhaps the most famous and best documented “female figure” on the planet. But she is also shrouded in mystery and beset by contradictions: both human and divine, queen and servant, a mother and a virgin. Could we trace this to her story – or her lack of story – considering that, despite her ubiquitous presence, her appearance is so brief, and her voice so silent, in the Bible?

Luke and Matthew speak of Christ’s birth. In Matthew, she is silent, while in Luke she speaks three times, including her powerful speech the Magnificat. In Mark and John, she appears twice. Yet throughout the Bible, there is no detail given of her birth, death, appearance or age. Although she is considered the closest human being to God and the Son, we are given no history of Mary. The only “details” outside her role as Christ’s mother are given in the Gospel of James, an apocryphal second-century text. Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur’an than in the New Testament.

Why is her story so absent? Because the Gospel-writers intended to tell the story of Jesus Christ, not his mother, and this has allowed church fathers and theologians to create their own elaborations and fabulations. Artists, too, have made their own interpretations.

Described by Hilary Mantel as the “improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated, but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature”, Mary has been reinvented according to the needs of society. Mantel says her nature as a mother and virgin “was a one-off by the deity, a singular chance for sullied female flesh to make itself acceptable to the celibate males who were in charge of whether or not we got to heaven”.

If we look back at depictions of her in art, it seems Mary morphed into this state visually, too. In the ninth century, she was a Byzantine icon, glittering on the heavenly ceiling of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. In 13th-century painter Cimabue’s gothic Maestà, she sat enthroned in a gleaming gold world. In 1310, she was depicted in Giotto’s revolutionary Ognissanti Madonna – a work thought to mark the entry point for Renaissance art, celebrated for its skilful naturalism and three-dimensional effects. Pictured without the earlier stiffness and flatness, Mary’s bodily flesh is evident under her robes.

In the succeeding centuries, she became increasingly humanised. By 1500, her image had been cemented in the west as a fair-skinned, middle or upper-class woman in blue, adorably doting on her baby, well on her way to becoming what would be held up as the idealised woman: obedient, subservient, saintly and of course “meek and mild”.

But what about Mary’s perspective? How did she feel? The stories art gives us have been almost always told by men – and Mary’s especially. Almost by definition, it lacks a female perspective, leaving viewers with warped ideas. So this Christmas I’m thinking about Mary – but through the eyes of women artists.

In Italy in 1613–14, Artemisia Gentileschi painted her Madonna and Child. Her Mary is humble (sitting on a simple wooden chair) and divine (boasting a thin, gold halo), but she is also somehow relatable. Robed in pink, as opposed to chaste blue, she is shown attempting, even struggling, to breastfeed a fleshy, wriggling golden-haired child. Her expression seems full of love and tenderness, but might her eyes be closed (and her hair, unlike in other depictions, not perfect) because, just like any mother, she is exhausted? Gentleschi’s depiction is worlds away from Jean Fouquet’s steely, almost robotic Melun Diptych, c 1452.

But to my mind, the richest and most complex depiction is by Paula Rego. In 2002, at the request of the then-president of Portugal, Jorge Sampiao, she re-envisioned and reclaimed Mary’s story. Setting out to tell the episodes from the perspective of a real woman, she said: “How do you update the story? In a sense, you can’t, but what you can do is see it from the point of view of a woman … in fact, Mary telling the story.”

Putting Mary above Christ, Rego gave real life to Mary’s experiences. Her Annunciation, showing a fluffy-winged angel delivering the message to a young, anxious and timid Mary, asks a lot of questions. What would it have been like for her? Did she want to go through with this? Was she ready? How old was she? Rego clad her Mary in a school uniform and used her 12-year-old granddaughter as a model. “She’s frightened and yet she’s accepting,” said Rego, who as a mother had a first-hand experience of pregnancy, unlike all those male artists.

In another work, Nativity, Rego shows a weary Mary clutching her swollen belly and lying back on another angel, eyes closed and full of pain. The artist makes us ask: why has the reality of something like childbirth been so overlooked in artistic depictions of Mary’s story? Isn’t it interesting that her only “act” was to give birth, yet there are no works portraying her actually doing so? Last July, at a church in Linz, someone was so horrified at the thought of the Virgin Mary giving birth that they beheaded a sculpture by Esther Strauss showing exactly that.

Why does it feel so radical? Is it because we are finally seeing this endlessly painted moment from the mother’s perspective?

Next time you watch a nativity play, or gaze at a Madonna and Child painting in a gallery or on a Christmas card, think about Mary. What is she going through? What are her thoughts? Worlds away from those of a blank-faced woman, such as this one at Ely Cathedral. Let’s give Mary agency. Women’s stories matter – and women’s perspectives too.

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