Madonna, an Italian word meaning 'My Lady,' used as the generic title for works of art, generally paintings, representing the Virgin, or the Virgin with the Infant Christ. Legend credits St Luke with having painted the first Madonna, a portrait put on the canvas from life, and with having carved the image of the Virgin in the Santa Casa at Loreto. After the Council of Ephesus (431), images of the Virgin with the Saviour in her arms became the recognised symbols of the orthodox faith. But the iconoclastic fury fomented by Leo III., the Isaurian, entailed the destruction of many of those early Madonnas. The oldest representations of the Virgin that survive are those which have been found in the catacombs, accompanying the tombs of the early Christians. Cimabue was the first to put natural life into the dead and angular designs of the Byzantine artists, and with him began that wonderfully productive and brilliant period of Italian art the all-dominant theme of which was the Madonna, that culminated in the glorious works of Raphael—the Sistine Madonna, the Madonna della Sedia, &c. These Italian artists handed on the cult to the German masters, who not only executed more realistic, more human pictures of the Virgin, but carved her effigy in wood. Amongst so many artists it is not surprising to find the subject treated in diverse styles and manners. To quote Mrs Jameson (Legends of the Madonna, new ed. 1890): 'Thus we have the stern, awful quietude of the old mosaics; the hard lifelessness of the degenerate Greek; the pensive sentiment of the Siena and the stately elegance of the Florentine Madonnas; the intellectual Milanese, with their large foreheads and thoughtful eyes; the tender, refined mysticism of the Umbrian; the sumptuous loveliness of the Venetian; the quaint characteristic of the early German, so stamped with their nationality . . . the intense lifelike feeling of the Spanish; the prosaic, portrait-like nature of the Flemish schools; and so on.'
The title Madonna is not used with rigid consistency: it is also applied to representations of the Annunciation, Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, Flight into Egypt, Holy Family, and all the several scenes and incidents in which the Virgin Mary personally figures. She is often represented too in certain specific characters with appropriate epithets, as La Vergine Gloriosa (with Jesus), Our Lady of Sorrow, Queen of Heaven, &c. Entire series exist depicting the events of her life, painted by painters like Giotto, Orcagna, Albert Dürer, and Luini. Two common series are the Seven Joys and the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin.
Besides Mrs Jameson's book, see works by Rohault de Fleury (1878), A. Schultz (1879), Erkl (1883), Von Schreibershofen (1886, for the middle ages (1879); Fäh, for the older German schools (1884); and Liell, for the catacomb pictures (1890).