Yesterday’s U3AC session looked at The Blessed Reader, images of the Virgin Mary, principally the Annunciation. The pictures included: the Simone Martini altarpiece, 1333, in Byzantine style; the Fra Angelico fresco from San Marco, Florence, c. 1435; a Veneziano predella from 1445; and the Merode Triptych from the workshop of Robert Campin, 1425-8. The class was rounded off with Madonna of the Goldfinch with Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist by Raphael, a high Renaissance work of around 1506. The Blessed Reader in Christian iconography is: a sacred reader; is reading a sacred text; is not of our world and does not speak to us as a person; and above all, the book she holds is a book of devotion, representing piety and purity.
Might we call this figure from Take a Seat the ‘Madonna of the Olympus’? There is no announcing angel, nor holy child. But she is somewhere else and what she holds is a sacred object of devotion in the Twenty-first Century.