Archangel Gabriel announces the immaculate conception of Jesus to Mary. The Soleiada of Joan Maragall, pregnant with light, she accepts the divine will and becomes a mother. A mother who is both human and divine. A mother who receives her child, loves him, feeds him, watches him grow, watches him suffer, and finally, watches him die.
Christian doctrine elevates motherhood above nature. It attributes to the Virgin Mary the role of intercession, and portrays her as a symbol of female excellence. The images of the Virgin, which in Catalonia mostly date from the 13th century, express this feminine ideal, and focus on the spiritual dimension of motherhood; however, at the same time, they channel and christianise the idea of an ancestral, maternal, creative divinity.
"What's happened to me?" Throughout history, there is no-one who could have asked themselves that question with more stupefaction than Mary. Grace strikes fear, bewilderment, wonder into people's hearts. It's like a stranger who suddenly turns up at your front door: they might do anything. And not just what comes from outside: there's also everything that we project, all the fears and joys that we bring from within ourselves.
Mary views the Stranger as someone to welcome, she accepts him, she glorifies him. She sings a song of praise and proclaims that the Stranger casts down the powerful and lifts up the humble, fills to overflowing the table of the hungry and strips the wealthy of their riches. What Mary accepts is that everything can change. No: that perhaps everything already has changed but we don't know it yet. Because that which is supremely spiritual needs what is most earthly, it needs the fearful, wearing slowness of gestation, and what is the highest expression of the flesh becomes the means for ultimate spiritual fulfilment.
"Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart", says the Gospel of Luke. All of this bewilderment, all of this surprise, good fortune and fear in equal proportions, incredulity, gratitude, good humour, can all this be concentrated in a single gaze?
Behold this wooden Virgin: perhaps it truly can be.
Raül Garrigasait Colomés
Virgin with Child
Unknown author
14th century
Polychrome gilded wood
Held at the Museu d'Art de Girona
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