The Holy Virgin Hodegetria

Here is the same ancient image repeated once more: the Virgin carrying her son and gesturing toward him, the type known as the Hodegetria. The name comes from a monastery in Constantinople, the Hodegon, where the original was kept and believed to have been painted from life by the evangelist Luke. That prototype was the city's great protector, carried along the walls in times of siege. It was lost when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. By the time this panel was made, around 1575, the famous original had been gone for more than a century, and still the pattern lived on, copied faithfully in workshop after workshop across the Orthodox world. The painter's task was to pass the received image on unchanged, which is why the pose here matches icons made hundreds of years and hundreds of miles apart.