The Virgin of Tenderness

This is the type the Greeks called Eleousa and the Slavs called Umilenie, the Virgin of Tenderness, and everything in it turns on a single gesture. The Christ child presses his cheek against his mother's, one small arm reaching up around her neck, while she bends her head down toward him. It is the most human of the images of Mary, a real embrace between a mother and her baby. That warmth carries a second meaning Orthodox viewers were meant to feel rather than read. Her eyes are lowered and sorrowful, looking past the child in her arms toward what is coming to him, so the tenderness and the coming Passion sit inside the same picture. Painted in 1601, it belongs to a long unbroken line of such images, copied and recopied for centuries. The closeness of the two faces, cheek against cheek, is the whole point, the detail every version of this type is built to deliver.