Growing up in Catholic Ireland of the fifties I got used to seeing “Holy Mary”-which is what we used to call her- constantly portrayed as this totally sexless blue and white young virgin.
This formed a deep imprint on me and was the picture always brought to mind of the Virgin, as if it were a contemporary photograph.

It was a bit of a shock then as I travelled abroad that I began to see a quite different image.
Last summer we saw this depiction of Mary in a little wayside church in Languedoc.
An entirely different lady with curves and clothed in clinging gold lamé instead of her usual blue and white.

Then in Le Puy en Velay we saw her again depicted in the more Irish puritanical fashion but well covered up.
The fact that she had had a child was shown by a peculiar marsupial device which has the infant poking out of a fold in her dress like a kangeroo from a pouch.

At Easter we were in a church in Morlaix, in Brittany, in which the original breast-feeding statue of Mary has been given a mastectomy by a nineteenth centuary puritan priest.

And then there is my favourite portrait of Mary of all time.
This is in Assisi and is by Piero de la Francesca.

It is most unusual in that it portrays her as pregnant, this was something that was very much glossed over in our perceptions of the virgin birth.

Not only is she pregnant but her amazing expression (eat your heart out Mona Lisa, this is enigmatic) shows her nervous,and reflective but still proud of her condition.

Amazing to think that Piero painted this in 1460.