“Black Madonna”

Black History Month is a wonderful occasion to talk about the legacy of the “Black Madonna” in Western European Medieval art. You are looking at one of the most revered statues from Medieval Spain, known as the Virgin of Montserrat, located in Catalonia and probably dating to the 12th century. Her skin and that of the Christ child are clearly black, earning her the moniker “la moreneta”, “the little brown-skinned one”. People have been traveling to the church where she resides for hundreds of years, and legends of miraculous healings and apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been told about this site for just as long.

There are hundreds of Black Madonnas (Wikipedia lists between 300-400) in Western Europe from the Middle Ages, mostly coming in two types: icons associated with Orthodox Christianity, and wooden sculptures. There are many reasons that these artistic forms proliferated. Some scholars have pointed to a connection with dark-skinned pagan Goddesses that may have pre-dated Christianity but were replaced by Black Madonnas — the Virgin of Montserrat’s mountain had been an Ancient Roman shrine dedicated to Venus, for example.

Also true is that many of the Black Madonnas were originally not painted with dark skin but changed color over time. However, evidence shows that these artworks were commonly venerated in the distant past by devotees who had a conception of a dark-skinned Mary. The Virgin of Montserrat is darker now than she originally was, as scientific studies have shown, but was deliberately repainted with black skin.

There is also Biblical precedent for associating Mary with dark skin. In the Hebrew Bible, the luscious Song of Songs celebrates a woman’s longing for her betrothed, and one of the lines was sung in Catholic masses celebrating the Virgin Mary that associated her with dark skin color: “nigra sed formosa/I am black but beautiful.” (1:5).

There is no one way to understand the predominance of Black Madonnas in European art, but their importance has persisted across time.