Programme 2

Programme Outline

The Virgin Mary features in many of the pictures of women in the National Gallery. She is usually shown as the ideal woman: she is ideally beautiful; she behaves as the perfect mother, as the mother of Jesus should; and she becomes a role model for all women. In Gossaert’s The Adoration of the Kings, Mary is gazing down at her son, totally absorbed in him. By contrast, Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus shows Venus as a fashionable, neglectful mother – ignoring her son to look at us, the viewers.