MaDonna’s & Gender in Medieval Art
There’s a fundamental difference in the modern viewer’s experience of religious medieval artwork, versus that of a contemporary viewer from it’s culture of origin. The author quotes Roland Barth’s theory of “underlying signifiers” where a viewer’s interest and therefore response to an image is impacted by conscious and unconscious emotional, social, and religious associations that are culturally important to the viewer. Given this, we as modern viewers are unable to see medieval artwork like the Bare breasted Madonnas and understand the image’s impact in the way their culture of origin would have experienced them. Miles then goes on to highlight several of the culturally relevant issues that would have influenced a contemporary viewer of the work versus the modern viewers probable association of an exposed breast with soft porn.
“ The modern interpreter must identify elements of the original cultural experience immediately related to the image. Such crucial variables as life expectancy, availability of food, marriage customs and child-rearing practices, gender conditioning, laws, and punishments are all aspects of communal life that can reveal reasons for the popularity of a particular visual image in a particular time and geographical location.”(pg28)
Breast feeding is not the common sight today that it would have been in the 14th century. A Medieval viewer would have had multiple associations with the image of a woman nursing, equating this image of the Virgin with an every day, every village scene, comparable to the actual women in their every day lives. The bare breasted Virgins appear to have been a 14th century Tuscan image. The physical conditions of life in that time and place were of a Europe which had increased in population by 300% in the preceding 300 years, an increase which was followed by crop failures and insufficient arable land to support the booming population, culminating in widespread famine followed...