Botticelli's Madonna and Child, with Saints

Luci Shaw Jesus looking like a real baby, not a bony homunculus, solemn and all-knowing. The quill in the hand of his newly-minted mother stretches toward the bottle of ink a beautiful boy saint is holding out. He has waited for centuries for her to write in a book the next words of her own Magnificat, for the Gospel of St. Luke, and for us to sing in church. Two other youths try to lower a crown onto her head. It is too large for her, and they’ve held it there for so long, but she seems bored with royalty, eyes only for her son, and his for her. In her left hand, as she supports the child, she holds a pomegranate under his fingers for him to pluck, its red leather skin peeled back to expose its packed rubies. Centuries later the paint and the fruit are fresh and tart as ever, glowing like blood cells. I wonder about sound in the room--small talk among the impossibly adolescent saints. Mary talking baby talk, perhaps, or singing as if she has swallowed a linnet-- Mary with the pale green voice, nothing coloratura, more like grapes glowing from a low trellis. In the moist Italian twilight, a cricket is likely to be sawing like the sawing of cedar boards in the work room just outside the painting’s frame--Joseph laboring on a baby bed. But there isn’t a bird or an insect. There is just this lovely girl, waking to motherhood, humming, content in this moment in time, to be God’s mother, to hold Jesus, when he cries, to her leaking breast. As Botticelli lifts with his skilled hand a fine brush to add the next word to her song, we look with him through the lens of his devotion into this ornate room. He paints love pouring through her skin like light, her eyes resting on the child as though he is all there is, as though her knowing will never be complete. Right from the beginning “How can this be?” circles her mind with its echo.