Vatican plea to uncover Virgin Mary and show her breast-feeding baby Jesus

But the Vatican yesterday said it wanted to see more paintings of a semi-nude Virgin Mary.

What Catholic leaders have in mind is more images of Mary breast-feeding baby Jesus.

The official newspaper of the Holy See has declared it is time to undo four centuries of church disapproval of traditional representations of Mary as an earthy, fleshy mother doting on her newborn son.

Images like Virgin and Child, by Joovs van Cleve, painted in 1525, have fallen out of favour in recent centuries

The latest edition of L’Osservatore Romano ran two articles by respected art critics who said that for nearly 1,500 years the Madonna was portrayed partly clothed and shamelessly nursing the Christ child.

One of them blamed Protestant prudes for changing the trends in religious art  that then led to the Virgin being covered up and left critics wondering if the infant Jesus was bottle-fed instead.

Such currents were so strong that even the nudes in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel were covered up in fear of giving offence, and today the best places to see pictures of Mary nursing Jesus are not churches but major art galleries  housing collections of Renaissance paintings.

But  the hugely influential newspaper - which is often seen as having the support of the Pope - has now called for the “artistic and spiritual  rehabilitation” of “loving and tender” images of Mary breast-feeding.

The intervention could inspire a revival in sacred art that would spell the end  of 400 years of dressing up the Virgin to make her look “respectable”.

One article, written by Italian Church historian Lucetta Scaraffia, claimed a  vast iconography of traditional Christian art had been "censored by the modern  age" because images depicting Mary's naked breast for her child were deemed  too "unseemly".

It said that artists later depicted the nursing Mary fully clothed because the Protestant reformers were generally critical of "the carnality and unbecoming  nature of many sacred images". 

But Miss Scaraffia argued that later depictions had also diminished the Madonna’ s human side "that touches the hearts and faith of the devout".

Miss Scaraffia said that when the early Christian artists represented the Virgin breast-feeding they had sought to reveal the reality of God's  incarnation.

A second piece, written by Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and  Christian literature in Rome, said: "The Virgin Mary who nurses her son Jesus is one of the most eloquent signs that the word of God truly and undoubtedly  became flesh."

Images of a semi-nude Mary breastfeeding can be traced back to early Christian  times and were popular during the Renaissance period of the Middle Ages.

But they came to an abrupt end around the 16th or 17th century with the emergence of Calvinism and other dour Protestant faiths that viewed representations of 'sexuality' as essentially sinful.

Such ideas were resisted by Rome but they were accepted by Catholics particularly  in France, Ireland and northern Europe.

The result is that very few, if any, Catholic churches or newspapers will dare  to show such imagery even today.