Madonna with Machine Gun

Karlis Padegs was barely 21 when he painted this in 1932, in an independent Latvia still living with the memory of the First World War. He gives the Madonna no Christ Child and no sheltering cloak. Instead she cradles a machine gun, its ammunition belt trailing down, and she stands among discarded boots and helmets. Medieval armies had prayed to the Mother of God to guard them in battle. Padegs hands her the weapon that had done most of the killing in the trenches barely a decade earlier. He was a notorious figure on the streets of Riga, theatrical and deliberately shocking, and he died in 1940 at just 29.