Italian school of the seventeenth century. The Virgin of the Milk. Oil on canvas. The Virgin of the Milk is an ...

Italian school of the seventeenth century. The Virgin of the Milk. Oil on canvas. The Virgin of the Milk is an invocation and an iconography of the Virgin Mary, in which she is represented in the act of breastfeeding the Child Jesus. The Virgin appears seated with the Child in her arms, she wears a red tunic and a blue cloak, the Child takes his Mother's breast in a landscaped setting. It is considered that this invocation may be a syncretism of the mother-goddesses, in particular of the goddess Isis nursing Horus, and probably the first images appeared in Coptic art. This iconographic model spread through Italy to the rest of Europe, enjoying great notoriety in the different Hispanic kingdoms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries –especially in the territories of the Crown of Aragon–, although examples were dated back to the thirteenth century. significant such as the miniature that illustrates the charter of the foundation of the Brotherhood of the Virgin Mary and Saint Dominic in Tárrega (Lérida), dated 1269 (Barcelona, ​​Archive of the Crown of Aragon) and the front of Betesa (Barcelona, ​​National Museum of Art of Catalonia). Reengineered. 64 x 85 cm.