There is a painting that I think about often. The Madonna del Parto, a 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 Nazis 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 pictures, which 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 Pietà I, is a result of her study of Michelangelo’s The Deposition.
