Small Cowper Madonna

The Madonna and Child is one of the central icon of Christianity, representing the Madonna or Mary, mother of Jesus and her son. After some initial resistance and controversy, the... formula "Mother of God" was adopted officially by the Christian Church at the Council of Ephesus, 431. The earliest representation of the Madonna and Child may be the wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, in which the seated Madonna suckles the Child, who turns his head to gaze at the spectator. The earliest consistent representations of Mother and Child were developed in the Eastern Empire, where despite an iconoclastic strain in culture that rejected physical representations as "idols", respect for venerated images was expressed in the repetition of a narrow range of highly conventionalized types, the repeated images familiar as icon . On a visit to Constantinople in 536, Pope Agapetus was accused of being opposed to the veneration of the theotokos and to the portrayal of her image in churches. Eastern examples show the Madonna enthroned, even wearing the closed Byzantine pearl-encrusted crown with pendants, with the Christ Child on her lap.
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The Italian Renaissance was the earliest manifestation of the general European Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement that... began in Italy around the end of the 13th century and lasted until the 16th century, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The term Renaissance is in essence a modern one that came into currency in the 19th century, in the work of historians such as Jacob Burckhardt. Although the origins of a movement that was confined largely to the literate culture of intellectual endeavor and patronage can be traced to the earlier part of the 14th century, many aspects of Italian culture and society remained largely Medieval; the Renaissance did not come into full swing until the end of the century. The word renaissance means “rebirth”, and the era is best known for the renewed interest in the culture of classical antiquity after the period that Renaissance humanists labelled the Dark Ages. These changes, while significant, were concentrated in the elite, and for the vast majority of the population life was little changed from the Middle Ages.
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