There is a painting that I think about often. The Madonna of childbirtha masterpiece painted by Piero della Francesca in about 1460, is housed in a dedicated museum in the Tuscan town of Monterchi. It depicts a heavily pregnant Virgin Mary flanked by two angels. To local women, this painting is considered a protector of fertility and the lives of pregnant women during birth. During the second world war, local women surrounded two men whom they had mistaken for a Nazi intent on stealing it. In 1954, they led a protest against its proposed movement to Florence for an exhibition. I remember reading as a student that the women had lain down in the street to block its departure.
I thought about those women again yesterday, as I walked around the Jenny Saville exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, tracing the influence of the Renaissance on her work. Saville’s dialogue with great painters began when she was young and an art historian uncle took her to Venice. It has continued throughout her career, most notably in her motherhood pictureswhich show her wrangling a baby, or both her babies, heavily influenced by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The ghosts of their Madonnas seem to linger in the sketch lines that swirl around Saville’s mother figure. One of her most famous works, the stunning, sculptural, charcoal and pastel Pity iis a result of her study of Michelangelo’s The Deposition.
I’m worried I’ll lose you in my nerdiness, so back to the protesting women of Monterchi. In my early 20s, I marvelled that anybody could care so much about a Renaissance painting as to lie down in the street as these women had. Such art left me cold, and no doubt my personal lack of religion was a factor. I dismissed it as all geriatric-looking baby Jesuses, and people pointing and kneeling. I understood, academically, its importance – the dawn of perspective! I studied and analysed the Titians and the Michelangelos as required, even passed a Socratic oral examination in Italian about the works of Leonardo. Yet where I had the choice, I always veered towards the abstract and the contemporary. None of it spoke to me the way a Rothko or a Joan Mitchell did.
I knew the problem was me: I just wasn’t getting it. That strange alchemy wherein some works of art fizz with resonance eluded me. Standing more than a decade later in Saville’s room of mother paintings, it seemed clear that my inability to “understand” certain paintings had been less about my irreligious upbringing and more about my lack of life experience. When I was 23, a man tried to kill me and the trauma of that seemed to partly manifest in a taste for the baroque (pretentious, yes, but we all work through our traumas using art, most commonly music. Consider this my death metal). I dragged my then boyfriend around Rome’s churches to look at Caravaggios; stood in front of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes at the Uffizi and felt her rage.
When I was younger, nothing felt more exposing than earnestness, so like many people in their 20s I hid my greenness behind an affected world-weary cynicism. But things happen in life. Significant, sometimes awful, things, and I think there’s also something about growing older that makes caring deeply and being open about it simply feel less embarrassing. As a young person, there was a closed-offness to the emotional complexity of certain experiences – not only death, but anything to do with pregnancy or motherhood. I didn’t want to go there.
Then, around the time I started thinking about having a baby, I began looking at paintings of the Annunciation. The depiction of that moment when the young Virgin Mary is told by the angel Gabriel that she will have a child – lack of belief in virgin birth aside, the artistic distillation of that feeling, of how much life is about to change – became interesting to me almost overnight. Only more so once I found out I was pregnant.
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As a child, I had copied the angel from From Angelico’s Annunciation from a book of my mother’s, ignoring Mary entirely. As a woman standing in front of it in Florence, all I could focus on was the expression on her face. Seeing things in person helps, but so, I suspect, do hormones.
This summer, a good friend discovered she was pregnant – it had happened so quickly that she was as shocked as I had been. I sent her an image of that painting, writing poetically that “she looks like she’s going to vom”. Perhaps I still have some way to go in my resistance to earnestness, but I wouldn’t return to my young, cynical self for anything. I’d rather be the person who, newly postpartum, wept at a Raphael Madonna, mortifying though it is.
I didn’t cry at the Saville show, but I came close in front of Aleppo, her Pietà for the children of Syria, which seemed also to contain all the grief and the agony of the mothers of the Gazan children murdered by Israel. I understood that the women of Monterchi weren’t only acting to protect a masterpiece, but to protect, as they saw it, one another, and their babies. Being willing to be moved by art also means being willing to be moved by the pain of other people, even to put yourself at risk for them. To lie down, in other words, in the street.
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist. Her book Female, Nude – a novel about art, the body and female sexuality – will be published in 2026.
