La Virgen María orando

Durer painted this praying Virgin in 1518, the year after an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther had posted his 95 theses and set the German lands arguing about the Church. Durer lived in Nuremberg, a city that would soon go Protestant, and he admired Luther openly. Yet here he gives the Virgin Mary the most tender, unquestioning devotion, hands folded, eyes lowered, a blue mantle against a dark ground. Images like this, and the whole cult of Mary behind them, were exactly what the reformers were beginning to attack. He kept the head close and simple, almost like a portrait of someone he knew.