Madonna Advocata

A pastoral visit to the Benedictine nuns of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio in Rome, in 1660, recorded an image of the Virgin brought from Greece by the first sisters of the convent. This is that panel, and the museum counts it the oldest painting in its collection. It catalogues the panel as the work of a Roman painter, and scholars have suggested it copies a lost original from Constantinople that the convent once owned. Its date is still argued over. Most place it in the 12th century. One study pushed it back to the third quarter of the 11th, others towards the middle or the very end of the 12th, even the start of the 13th, and the museum keeps the whole span open. The type is the Advocata, the intercessor. Mary turns three-quarters, one hand on her breast, the other raised and open in a gesture of pleading for the faithful. The flat figures and the colour laid in fields between firm outlines follow Byzantine models. Unusually, a small Christ appears at the upper left, blessing in the Greek manner and touching her halo. Along the bottom runs the Latin Sancta Virgo Virginum, holy Virgin of virgins, a title that suited the nuns who kept it. They credited it with putting out a fire in their convent, and on 12 September 1668 the Chapter of Saint Peter's crowned it.