Yesterday I visited the church of San Frediano. It is an unremarkable church by Florentine standards but Mass had just begun and sitting through the service (even though I understood very little) the whole building, frescos, altars and statues made sense in the context of worship.
Today I visited Santa Trinita and a 'service' of reciting the rosary took place while I was there. These devotions are in keeping with the proliferation of images of Mary all over the city (at street corners, over doors & in house windows as well as churches) but did little for me and seemed to bear little relation to the very high quality paintings on the walls of the church
In part this is probably a deep seated prejudice of my Protestant upbringing. Mary was largely seen as an obstacle rather than a means of access to a relationship with God. But in art there is a (fairly) clear distinction between the quite simple images and statues of Marian devotion, such as this (rather fine) example from our visit to San Gimignano (a medieval town in the Tuscan hills):
and the much more complex paintings of the Renaissance such as this by Rosselli:
The paintings tend to make far greater use of symbolism, introduce other characters (Joseph and John the Baptist are logical, St Catherine or various patron saints less so) explore relationships between them and tell a whole complex story of salvation.
At the heart of this is relationships. In exploring relationships between the characters, the paintings give testimony to God, in Jesus, being a god who relates to us. The paintings are not really of Mary but rather of the nature of God.
But just when I begin to feel the intellectual superiority of art-lover over faithful Catholic, I am reminded that most of these painters also produced statues, or panels with far simpler images of Mary & Jesus. Take for example this terracotta by Buglioi:
Perhaps these too are about relationships. Perhaps those ladies saying their rosary in Santa Trinita know this very well, and praying to Mary brings them in to a relationship with God? Perhaps I've still got much to learn.
Thanks for these reflections Nigel. The proliferation of Mary depictions always turns me off when ever we are in the Southern Med European countries, but as you say one just has to hope that they provide (if a rather convoluted and unnecessary) way of talking to God.
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