Photo: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, Rogier van der Weyden, c1435–40
Something about Mary: Simon Webb imagines a scene
‘Could some meek little poppet have coped with what I had to cope with?’
The Durham Quaker Bible group is looking at the figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus. One of our number, who knows his way round the Good Book, took us through the mentions of this celebrated lady in the New Testament.
It did not take long: there are very few. With so little information, it seems impossible to get a comprehensive idea of the girl from Nazareth, yet centuries of tradition and interpretation have given us a sort of virgin goddess – a character who, I would suggest, would be quite alien to either Mary’s or Jesus’s Jewish contemporaries.
Thinking aloud in the Bible group, I imagined a variation on one of the less familiar depictions of Mary: Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin by the Dutch artist Rogier van der Weyden. In this marvellous rendering (left), Luke (said to be an artist and physician as well as a gospel-writer) kneels awkwardly, sketchbook in hand, before a shy Virgin, her eyes downcast.
I am imagining both of them older, living in the aftermath of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. Mary, embittered by the way the world treated her son, has so much to say to her sainted draughtsman. ‘Because I was a young girl, you had to make me meek and mild. Could some meek little poppet have coped with what I had to cope with?’ (I’ve been reading a lot of George Bernard Shaw lately, and in my imagination this Mary has become something of a Shavian heroine.)
‘And what’s all this obsession with virginity?’ she goes on. ‘Why should I have been ashamed to give myself to the man I was to marry? How do you imagine my son could be in David’s line if his father was your angel Gabriel? It’s in the name – “angel” means “messenger”. They don’t impregnate us, they talk to us!’
‘But, my lady,’ says Luke, abashed, ‘I only wanted to exalt you…’
‘You exalted nothing but some bizarre metaphysics. What you exalted was not me, but a chimera. You turned me into one of your pagan statues – a cold marble maiden. And now they all worship me, and not God!’
‘You are an inspiration to people everywhere,’ Luke complains.
‘I am an aspiration,’ Mary counters. ‘Now men aspire to marry wilting virgins, and women try to deny themselves. How dare you make me the focus of all this folly? Do you think the kingdom my son talked about is going to be helped into existence by china dolls?’
Mary’s sudden silence is even more disturbing to Luke than her speech. He only pretends to go on painting. At least now her lips are still. But they are set in a discontented shape. How can he paint them like that? He sets the brush down, and looks afresh at the strong, wiry, middle-aged woman in front of him. His picture is nothing like her, he realises. For a second, his inner eye glimpses the possibility of a strange, harsh new kind of art, that could show her as she really is.
