Beauty is harmony. When outer human beauty expresses the inner harmony of the soul, this beauty becomes radiant. In religious Art, the depictions of Mary’s physical harmony is a true match for her interior splendor, incredibly revealed by an archangel as a soul “full of grace”, of which the outer human beauty so many thousands of artists, both in the East and the West have tried to capture, from the time of Jesus (1).
From Romanesque interiority to the aesthetic exuberance of the Renaissance
However, the very diverse tendencies in evoking the beauty of the Blessed Virgin depending on the time period and the culture can’t escape notice, which makes Marian Art so rich with an often unsuspected profusion, because the mother of Jesus is really a human person, the most universally celebrated woman in the Arts of all cultures! Although, in general, we find very early in the West, (2) and up to the late Middle Ages, representations of the Virgin (Romanesque or Gothic frescoes, mosaics, paintings, sculptures, etc.) which stir up a spiritual response rather than just a fleeting emotion. At the time of the Italian Renaissance (15th century) a turning point occurred in Western Art that tended to glorify exterior beauty, magnifying the splendor of bodily shapes or emphasizing emotional excitement.
The Virgin more embodied in the West, more contemplative in the East
Who has never heard of the voluptuous Madonnas by Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck or the joyful realism of the Madonna and Child by Perugino, or the sorrowful faces by El Greco? Similarly, statuary art developed into the Baroque and flamboyant, favoring a certain magnificence more embodied--and even more opulent. At the same time, Marian Art in the East, mostly controlled by the Russian Byzantine School of Iconography, has focused from the first centuries and until now, on a style of painting much more directly contemplative: icons, which today are well-known everywhere, and in front of which people now pray in western oratories ...
Iconographic Art encourages the soul to pray through gazing at a painting. If you contemplate the Black Madonna of Czestochowa (Poland), the equally famous Our Lady of Kazan (Russia), the Maronite Madonnas or the Greek Theotokos, you will find that the beauty radiated by Mary is primarily an interior and heavenly splendour, brought about by the presence of the Divine in her.
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(1) Cf. the portrait of Mary attributed to Luke the Evangelist, see article: "What is Mary’s Portrait?"
(2) The first representations of the Madonna and Child go back to the Third Century found in frescoes discovered in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome.
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