NADA Miami 2023

Renaissance masters carried out specific commissions while quietly fighting their battles over what could or could not be painted of the Virgin Mary. In Renaissance Italy, for example, she was by no means allowed to be a redhead. Such a premise allows Rasa Jansone to interpret the historical Madonna (Raphael’s The Small Cowper Madonna, c. 1505. The National Gallery of Art, Washington) as a literal cutout from a textbook on beauty or canonical depictions of the ideal mother. Jansone combines it with images from modern women’s lifestyle, travel and glossy fashion magazines.

Both these images – that of the Renaissance woman and the modern woman – combine to create a new complex image where it is impossible to picture today’s woman without her historical predecessor Mary. It is impossible to tell which one is more dominant, or where one ends and the other begins.