The Madonna and Child is one of the central icon of Christianity, representing the Madonna or Mary, mother of Jesus and her son. After some initial resistance and controversy, the formula "Mother of God" (Theotokos) was adopted officially by the Christian Church at the Council of Ephesus, 431. The earliest representation of the Madonna and Child may be the wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, in which the seated Madonna suckles the C...
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The Madonna and Child is one of the central icon of Christianity, representing the Madonna or Mary, mother of Jesus and her son. After some initial resistance and controversy, the formula "Mother of God" (Theotokos) was adopted officially by the Christian Church at the Council of Ephesus, 431. The earliest representation of the Madonna and Child may be the wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, in which the seated Madonna suckles the Child, who turns his head to gaze at the spectator.
The earliest consistent representations of Mother and Child were developed in the Eastern Empire, where despite an iconoclastic strain in culture that rejected physical representations as "idols", respect for venerated images was expressed in the repetition of a narrow range of highly conventionalized types, the repeated images familiar as icon (Greek "image"). On a visit to Constantinople in 536, Pope Agapetus was accused of being opposed to the veneration of the theotokos and to the...
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