Mary and the Women She Inspired at Sam Fogg, London

THURSDAY, June 27th was the feast day of St. Cyril of Alexandria (died 444) and was an appropriate day for the opening of Sam Fogg’s latest exhibition, ‘Mary and the Women she Inspired’.

Cyril became Patriarch of Alexandria in 412 and, against the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius—who taught that two distinct persons coexisted in the incarnate Lord, one human and the other divine—asserted that Christ was one person, fully human and fully divine.

This doctrine triumphed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and made possible the nickname of the Virgin Mary as “Theotokos”, the bearer of God, which remains to this day the Catholic belief accepted by the Church.

Christianity spread south from Gaza and north to Lebanon and Syria, and then westward into the Byzantine world, into communities and cultures that did not respect Semitic prohibitions against representational images and had therefore developed an iconography for Christian salvation history.

Sam Fogg, LondonAncient Christian icon of the Virgin and Child, northern Egypt (6th century)

The first image presented in this remarkable exhibition is a Coptic textile from Upper Egypt depicting the Virgin and Child. Christ stands with his hands raised in blessing, while the seated Madonna has been looking straight ahead at us for 1,500 years. She is clearly “carrying” God into the world. It is suggested that the composition may have come from an even earlier carved prototype.

The sculptures here include not only an early 14th-century limestone figure of Mary Magdalene in the desert, measuring three and a half feet high (from the Île de France), but also a walnut one of a nude Mary of Egypt (vs.1470-80), wrapped only in her luxuriant hair and holding three loaves of bread.

The most unusual iconography is that of the Deposition of Christ, painted around 1500 (Augsburg School). The panel shows the path of the dead Christ from the foot of the hill of Calvary to a second hill where there is a tomb cut into the rock.

Saint John, carrying a processional cross, leads the sad group with an old Nicodemus holding the torso of Jesus under his arm followed by Joseph of Arimathea, holding his knees. Both men are hampered by their robes. The four Marys follow, the last two being myrophores (myrrh-bearers), carrying spices, the Magdalene acting as thurifer and the Virgin acting as acolyte with a candle. Pinned to the back is a contemporary note mentioning that a margrave said his prayers before the image in 1531. In the heart of Mayfair, we too can stop and pray.

The exhibition ‘Mary and the Women she Inspired’ is on view at Sam Fogg, 15d Clifford Street, London W1S, until 26 July. Telephone: 020 7534 2100.

www.samfogg.com