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Madonna And Madonna Comparison

Decent Essays

The Madonna: a picturesque representation of Judeo-Christian ideology’s mother Mary and her young prophetical child, an infant Christ – an innocent and thus, oppressive trope of renaissance art that echoes throughout art history as subject matter for masters from Byzantine proto-renaissance, mannerist, and baroque, to contemporary artists alike. The Madonna was, just like nearly everything with religious epithets, a means of influencing followers. Being no exception, the Madonna represents something sinister. Despite the lamb-wool-white façade incumbent to its subject, the subjugation of women through assigning their role as conclusively maternal and depriving them of their sexuality. The Madonna facilitates the mentality that women are merely complementary means to men that are solely meant to execute the role of maternal figures. Two grossly contrasting works accentuate a critical contemporary perspective on the evolution of feminine roles from early Christian ideologies. Jan Van Eyck’s 1436 painting, Lucca Madonna, and Catherine Opie’s 2004 photograph, Self-Portrait Nursing, exercise formal elements to criticize the sociocultural value of women from early 15th century Europe from a contemporary view. Although created nearly 600 years apart, both works are weighty representations of the climate surrounding their society’s perspective on femininity and reduce it to a trite set of visual stereotypes: namely, a primary culprit of contemporary gender inequality that is the

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