This slim volume provides a valuable contribution to the study of the art of the fourteenth century. Beth Williamson presents the iconographic theme of the Madonna of Humility and offers “both a new methodology and a new meaning of the image itself” (11). Whereas art historians frequently set out to revise a disciplinary narrative or adjust a category or genre by giving prominence to a neglected work or assigning importance to the role of such an object in re-contouring the establishment of the motif, Williamson sets a more ambitious task for herself by proposing to re-evaluate the composition of the motif, its appearance, its development, its proliferation in several topographies, and its various meanings. She approaches her problem from different directions: reviewing the art historiography, re-assessing visual evidence (particularly manuscript studies), demonstrating political and personal allegiances among those patrons associated with the spread of the motif, re-evaluating the social and economic history associated with customs that constitute the iconography, and considering devotional and ritual practices in which such works participated.

Williamson points to Georgiana Goddard King (“The Virgin of Humility,” Art Bulletin 17 (1935): 474–91), Millard Meiss (“The Madonna of Humility,” Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 435–65 and Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Henk van Os (Marias Demut und Verherrlichung in der Sienesischen Malerei 1300–1450, s’-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij,1969), and finally Joseph Polzer (“Concerning the Origin of the Madonna of Humility,” Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 27 (2000): 1–31) as the art historians who defined and redefined the motif, set its limits and meanings, and debated its origins. Williamson asserts that all were concerned primarily with determining its genesis and establishing its earliest development. One is thereby reminded of Michel Foucault’s observations that things are usually perceived as purest at the moments of their inception, even though that which is the beginning of one phenomenon is at the same time the middle and end of several others. To Meiss’s credit, however, it must be remembered that his perusal probed beyond the beginnings, tracing some formal aspects to classical antiquity, and that he followed the Madonna of Humility through several fifteenth-century Netherlandish examples, finally ending with Titian. The above-mentioned scholars have generally considered the Madonna of Humility as a motif extracted from a narrative setting, be it verbal or visual, but they have not agreed which narrative or narratives provide the source(s) for its derivation. Meiss, perhaps because he republished his exploration of the Madonna of Humility as a chapter in Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, is most often associated with the study and delineation of the motif. Throughout his essay, Meiss discusses a hypothetical lost prototype painted by Simone Martini, whom he credits with the invention of this radically innovative form and iconography (133).

Williamson demonstrates that to this day the very definition of this object of inquiry—one that is visually descriptive—is problematic. As foremost of the characteristics, the Virgin is depicted seated on the ground. In addition to the obvious implications of this lowly position, this feature was associated with an etymological connection drawn by Isidore of Seville, which linked the Latin humilitas with humus for earth. Inscriptions label some of the primary examples as Our Lady of Humility. For instance, the earliest dated painting, that by Bartolomeo da Camogli in Palermo from 1346 is inscribed NOSTRA DONNA DE HUMILITATE and that in Modena by Fra Paolo da Modena painted around 1370 is lettered NOSTRA DONNA DE UMILITA. However, many examples do not display this content expressis verbis. In fact, some versions carry quite different inscriptions, thus demonstrating that this designation could not have been perceived as the title for the motif. As a third distinguishing feature of the Madonna of Humility, the Virgin was shown nursing the Christ child. As a fourth and final feature, most of the images include the so-called apocalyptic symbols. These signs usually consisted of rays emanating from the head of the Virgin to denote the sun, to which a circle of stars was sometimes added (frequently twelve in number), as well as a crescent moon at her feet. Infrequently a wreath of flames appears rather than the rays. These signs originated with the vision of Saint John (Apocalypse, 12: 1ff) in which the Woman of the Apocalypse appears within a narrative description. Medieval exegetes associated her with Ecclesia and thus also with the Virgin Mary.

Williamson crosses many borders including those constructed as historical topographies but which may more accurately be diagnosed as modern linguistic barriers that serve to limit scholarship. These boundaries are those still observed although often disavowed between broad artistic traditions in Italy and those north of the Alps as well as those more specifically assigned to Italian, French, Bohemian, or German territories during the fourteenth century. Williamson has also challenged the hallowed position of several other sacred cows of art-historical practice. For one, she stresses the roles of manuscript illuminations in iconographic development. For another, she mixes her methodologies, not championing one over the other or asserting that new ways of viewing through the lenses of personal and political, social and economic history should replace the more traditional methods of assembling comparanda internal to the history of art. In many of these endeavors she, in the opinion of this reader, follows Meiss’s lead.

Perhaps Williamson’s most valuable contribution lies in her shift in agencies. Traditionally, especially for the Middle Ages, with its comparative lack of sources as to the genesis of specific works of art, the objects themselves have been endowed with imagined powers that allow the works to operate in almost animated ways or as if possessed by numens. As generations of art historians have arranged and rearranged photographs recording views of the objects that so captured their interest, with the aim of establishing relationships between them, these works have been perceived almost as if embodying genetic codes. A hidden agendum thus successfully fulfilled was the attainment of respect for the discipline as a bona fide and specialized science not unlike that of biology. These methods were first applied to style and then to iconography, or to a combination of the two. Whether understood as abstract art-historical shorthand or something more concrete, insistence that one work had influenced another, that one work was dependent on one or more earlier works, or that a lost prototype or missing link in the family tree provided a necessary precondition to explain the appearance or even existence of a work structured much of art history’s rhetoric on medieval works.

By the early to mid-fourteenth century a few named masters entered the scene and were recognized as innovators and leaders. Outstanding individuals like Simone Martini, Master Theoderic, and Peter Parler were elevated to the status of creative genius. Every other artist or artisan was relegated to the ranks of the copyists, whose aims were to multiply and transmit the work of the few innovators. Williamson dismisses notions of influence with or without named paternities (2–6). Inverting the paradigm, she assigns ultimate agency to the art of appropriation or translation—conscious or unconscious—placing the patrons and sponsors who commissioned works in a position alongside or even in front of the artists as the iconographical decision makers.

In her interrogation of the meaning of the lactans motif, Williamson questions its significance as predominately one of lowliness and humility. She points to theological accents and usages associating images of the lactating Virgin with her role as mediatrix. Williamson convincingly argues from the context of the role of the Virgin within the so-called double intercession and demonstrates the prevalence of the image of the Madonna of Humility in paintings and frescoes that functioned as memorial pieces for their sponsors—particularly confraternities. This motivation is underscored in the highly unusual representation in a panel painted around 1360 by a Venetian painter and today in the Thyssen Collection in Madrid. A kneeling venerator, presumable the donor, is presented to the Virgin of Humility not by a saint but by a skeleton who utters a warning much like those voiced in representations of the Dance of Death, thus making the panel a memento mori and stressing the urgent necessity for intercession.

Since the publication of The Madonna of Humility, another art-historical Marian category—the so-called Schöne Madonna (beautiful Madonna)—has been addressed in an exhibition in the Landesmuseum in Bonn and its accompanying catalogue (Schöne Madonnen am Rhein, 2009). Usually consisting of a sculpted figure of the Virgin with a charming and youthful countenance, standing with her weight on one leg and supporting the Christ child on her opposite hip, this type developed during the second half of the fourteenth century. The exhibition/catalogue treated the phenomenon primarily, but not exclusively, as one of style but asked questions similar to those posed by Williamson with respect to origins, essences, and the reasons behind its proliferation. Here too the authors proposed patronage networks. The exhibition incorporated several additional motifs, among them an example of a sculpted Virgin of Humility. The piece from the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne shows the Virgin seated on the ground, engulfed in what appear to be flames, an adaptation necessary as the motif was translated into the medium of wooden sculpture (206).

Williamson complicates old social-historical connections and thus invites readers to probe deeper. She questions whether, during the fourteenth century, viewers would have first and foremost considered breastfeeding a lowly activity relegated to wet nurses, proposing instead an emphasis on the Virgin’s purity, rationalized through late medieval warnings against nursing a child after the onset of a new pregnancy and resultant precautions that wet nurses practice sexual abstinence. As the lactans motif was continued into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists fashioned overtly erotic images such as Hans Baldung’s painting Mary with the Parrots from 1533, in which the Virgin and the Christ child appear to expose her breast for the viewing pleasure of the audience, with whom they rather self-consciously maintain eye contact. Margaret Miles has called attention to the multiple meanings (“The Virgin’s One Bare Breast, Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, 193–208 [reprinted in Expanding the Discourse, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, eds., Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, 26–37, and most recently expanded in A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]). How then did the erotic function within the viewing context of Mary’s roles as mediatrix and how did it serve ideologically to normalize gender roles?

Yet another question arises with respect to methodology and basic dilemmas of the discipline. Everything, from the most fundamental and conscious choices involved in the fashioning of an image to the most latent attitudes aroused through the briefest viewing of an image, is complexly backgrounded and momentarily circumstantial. The few sources that survive in which medieval makers and users of images expressed ideas, revealed emotions, and recorded practices—be these in contracts, instruction manuals, testaments, inventories, chronicles, sermons, private letters, visitation protocols, saints’ vitae, miracle books, or visions—teach less about how to extrapolate generalities or generate patterns than they show how the history of each work of art is particular. Further, they illustrate that the terms used to identify images and refer to kinds of images, as well as their perceived meanings and proclivities, were all far from stabile. Larry Silver recently demonstrated how meanings and usages could be expanded to the extreme in his study of post-Reformation “mariolatry” in connection with the Maria in Sole (“Full of Grace: Mariolatry in post-Reformation Germany,” in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, Michael Wayne Cole and Rebecca Zorach, eds., Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, 289–316). Perhaps it is, as Williamson implies, more important to interrogate concepts such as the Madonna of Humility than to believe that one can adjust and refine them so sufficiently that they can reflect legitimacy then and maintain validity now. However, for all of their troubled applications in this poststructuralist environment, tags and taxonomies are as necessary today as handles and tools as they are reductive and dangerous when digital technologies give databases universal authority.

Williamson’s The Madonna of Humility offers a welcome art-historical contribution to the recent resurgence of interest in the Virgin Mary. Since, during the fourteenth century, the Virgin reached her apogee in nearly universal recognition of a role that approached that of the Godhead as co-redemptrix, it may be hoped that this focused interrogation will help shed light on the unprecedented heights of her veneration during the late Middle Ages. Since images of the Virgin and child not only reflected but also promoted various notions about and cults of the Virgin, this study can provide glimpses into the past that are not possible through other media and can thus add visual fabric to the foundational works by Marina Warner (Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, New York: Knopf, 1976) and Jaroslav Pelikan (Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) as well as descriptive details to the new critical volumes by Miri Rubin (Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 and Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009).