Mary, a portrait

I completed my graduate studies in Mariology, the study of the Virgin Mary, through the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. As part of my final project, I worked with Ori Media to recreate eight iconic images of the Virgin Mary using modern photography. Scroll down to learn more about the project or purchase prints from my Etsy store.

About the project

During the third century, a Christian hymn was written on a piece of papyrus. It referred to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as Theotokos, a Greek word meaning “Mother of God.” Known as the Sub Tuum Praesidium, this small Egyptian text is the first known reference to Mary by that title. It was not, however, the first time that word was used.

During the Hellenistic period (circa 323-30 BC), the title Theotokos was used by the Egyptians to refer to another deity: Isis, the mother of Horus. The Egyptian “Mother of God” was an empowering figure known throughout the Fertile Crescent, and it was with great reverence that many early writers ascribed the same terminology to the Christian “Mother of God.”

Isis was a matriarch. One very much venerated at the time of Jesus’ birth. Though debated by Catholic and Protestant scholars, secular classicists such as R. E. Witt, and historians such as Stephen Benko, saw Isis as the “great forerunner” of Mary. To draw similarities between the Egyptian mother of Horus and the Jewish mother of Jesus would have been to ascribe importance to Mary, they said.

If someone, for instance, were to deem a startup “the next Apple,” we would immediately be able to conjure up an image of what that company might be like. The technology company was known for its innovative ideas, minimalist technologies, and sleek designs, and so it is easy for us to understand—without too much further description—that this new company might have similar characteristics.

In this way, early Christians used common descriptions of Isis to describe Mary. Both women were called “Mother of God” as well as “Queen of Heaven.” Even the iconography depicted both women holding their sons in their laps or nursing them at their breasts. The message of early Christian writers was clear: Mary is the new Isis.

In addition to being called “Mother of God” and “Queen of Heaven,” Isis was also called “virgin.” The Greek term used was parthenos, the same word used by New Testament authors to describe Mary. Only Isis was not a virgin in the physical sense. In fact, though often implied, the sexual connotation of that word did not occur until the bible was translated into English in the 15th-16th centuries AD.

According to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, as well as anthropologist and author Lesley Hazleton, a more adequate translation of the term parthenos at that time had less to do with sexual abstinence and more to do with status. It meant, quite simply, “unmarried.” This was a powerful statement at a time when women who married became the property of their husbands. Mary’s virginity wasn’t important initially for the sake of her purity, but for the sake of her authority. She belonged to no man. And that was a bold statement to make about women at the time.

She belonged only to God.

Indeed, as veneration of Mary rose during the second through fourth centuries, the worship of Isis fell. By the fifth century AD, Mary had all but replaced her Egyptian forbearer.

By the time she was painted by Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Bouguereau, Mary was already altered to fit a new time and place—one far removed from the one she was born into. In the Louvre, at the Met, and on the walls of the Legion of Honor, there hangs a portrait of Mary painted by centuries of Renaissance men. She is white, graceful, beautiful, regal. She is all the things people in those times wanted her to be—and all the things they wanted women to be.

That Mary was was subdued, submissive, and subservient. She was free from all sin and maintained her virginity until the day she died. And, according to Catholicism, she was the “perfect role model for women.” Catholicism being the dominant force in Middle-Age and Renaissance-era Europe—the idolization of Mary appeared to me the very root from which every act of gender inequality stemmed. It enforced centuries of subservient women, striving for unattainable perfection.

But that’s not who Mary was in her time to her people.

The first-century Mary was not meek or submissive, she was strong and rebellious. She overcame adversity to give her son a better life —and her people. Like Isis before her, she was a Middle Eastern girl who became the Mother of God. And that was a powerful message for women in her time and place.

The only way to change our view on women then, I thought, was to repaint our model. Giving her an authority that more closely resembled who she was at the time while giving women a more powerful role model they could look to today. And the only way I could see fit to do that was to undertake an art project that would recast Mary for the modern world.

That is why, for my final project for my graduate studies in Mariology at the University of Dayton, I decided to recreate eight iconic images of the Virgin Mother using modern photography. In so doing, my hope was to unveil who Mary was during her own time, and why she is still relevant to us today.

Here is the end result:

The annunciation

The first photo I wanted to recreate was the Annunciation, inspired by the scripture found in the book of Luke chapter one, verses 26- 28:

“Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the descendants of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming in, he said to her, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was very perplexed at this statement, and kept pondering what kind of salutation this was.”

According to my professor Father François Rosier, Jewish people in those times did not have direct experiences with the Divine—that was relegated to the realm of the priest. Once a year, the priest entered the Holy of Holies—the innermost sanctum of the temple where the Divine dwelled. He wore bells on his feet and was attached with a rope in case he should lose consciousness in the presence of the Divine and require his contemporaries to pull him back out to the realm of the living.

It is for this reason that Mary was fearful when she saw the angel. Perhaps she would have felt as though she were going mad to behold such visions, or that she might be nearing her death. I wanted that fear to come across in the image.

The most challenging aspect of creating this image was deciding how to depict the angel. Ultimately, we decided a single arm—as used in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam—would be most effective. To accomplish the look, three producers stood atop a ladder: one holding a spotlight down on her face, one holding a fog machine, and one holding his arm outstretched. The behind-the-scenes view was rather hilarious, but the desired result was achieved.

Her face is highlighted, showing a look of fear, perhaps even a level of uncertainty at what she is experiencing. And she is discovered at that moment while picking roses, a nod to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Mother and child

Madonna on a Crescent Moon in Hortus Conclusus painted by an unknown artist in the 1450s is the most iconic and prolific of Marian iconography. It shows a mother (Mary) and her child (Jesus). Mother and Child iconography is common in almost every religious tradition. This is because the subject matter is powerful: It’s about woman creating and nurturing life.

Today, motherhood is often under-appreciated. Mothers are made to feel as though their contributions do not matter, or are less important than the contributions of fathers. I wanted to flip that around and remind women of their power. That a woman has the power to create life—and that that is perhaps the most powerful contribution one can make to humanity.

Our lady of sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows is a depiction of Mary in mourning. According to tradition, many portraits and statues of Our Lady of Sorrows are found weeping, with real tears streaming down their faces—a miracle from the Virgin Mother herself. The vision for this shoot was to capture that visceral emotion of mourning.

The immaculate heart of Mary

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is meant to be a pictorial representation of Luke chapter two verses 34-35:

“Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.’”

It’s meant to depict a woman who is so overcome by the grief of her own son’s death that she rips her heart from her chest, and yet traditional depictions show a demure, serene, even prayerful woman. To me, grief is a wretched thing and I wanted to portray the madness of it. The complete and utter chaos that can well within a person, and form a wildness so potent that they are capable of all manner of treachery. The book of Job comes to mind here.

To capture this, it was important to me that we have a real heart for the photo. When I mentioned this to the photographer, Ori said: “I got a guy.” He made a quick phone call, said no more than a couple of words, and when he got off the phone told me he had secured two pig hearts. His crew picked them up the day of the shoot and brought them to the studio. As they were no longer beating, they were very pale in color, so we bought fake blood from a Halloween store and used it to redden the heart.

Cloaked in a black veil of mourning, we placed the heart in our model’s hands, and covered her arms with blood. Then we told her of the grief and the madness we wanted her to portray, and she fell into it. There was the emotion I understood.

The dormition

According to Orthodox Tradition, the “falling asleep of Mary” or “Dormition” is when Mary dies to this world and enters into the next one. As in the 1392 Repose of the Virgin Mary by Theophanes the Greek, she is taken into heaven “body and soul.” Jesus swaddles Mary’s soul while Hieromartyrs Dionysius the Areopagite and Ignatius the God-Bearer appear on either side of him. According to tradition, they are responsible for transmitting the account of the dormition.

The vision here was to achieve both life and death in one photo, highlighting the integration of body and soul. She sleeps, and yet looks vibrant and alive. Laying upon a bed of roses she is symbolic of how she will come back to us in apparitions, and has a rosary at her breast symbolic of how she will live on in our hearts.

The coronation

Like many of the deities before her —Isis in Egyptian mythology, Hera in Grecian, Inanna in Mesopotamian — Mary too was called Queen of Heaven. Recognized as such by Pope Pius XII, she follows Davidic tradition which recognizes the mother of the king as the Queen Mother.

Traditional portraits of the Coronation, such as Sandro Botticelli’s 1481 Madonna of the Magnificat, show Mary being crowned by angels.

Once again, our team was confounded by how best to portray heavenly bodies. This time, we decided a pair of disembodied hands would do the crowning, an allusion to the mysteries of heaven.

Our lady of Guadalupe

According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to a native Mexican peasant named Juan Deigo four times in the mid-1500s. The local priest didn’t believe Juan Diego until the fourth apparition when she told Juan Diego to gather flowers from the top of Tepeyac Hill. He followed her instructions and found Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, blooming there.

Arranging the flowers in his tilma, or cloak, when he opened it before archbishop Zumárraga the flowers fell to the floor, and on the fabric was the miraculous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

To recreate the image using photography, we thought it would be beautiful to use roses in place of her halo, making it appear as though the image is coming from the inside of Juan Diego’s cloak. To do this, we taped roses to a piece of foam core and held it behind her. We took special care to ensure the tilt of her head and hands exactly matched the positioning of the ancient image.

Woman of the apocalypse

The Woman of the Apocalypse, as depicted by Francesco Vanni’s 1588 Immacolata Concezione con Gesù e Dio Padre comes from the book of Revelations chapter 12. The text reads: “A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

This image required the most preparation, as we had to build a moon out of wood and gold tinfoil and hire a snake handler to bring us our representation of Evil. The snake handler brought two boxes of snakes, from which we chose the one best resembling the Evil brought into the world by Eve, and now crushed underfoot by Mary.

The snake is trampled under foot by Mary, symbolic of how she stomped out Satan, destroying Evil once and for all with the birth and death of her son.

The 12 stars, representing the 12 tribes of Israel, were added by the graphic designer in post-edits.

To purchase prints from this project, visit my Etsy store.