The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c12.9

c12.9

It will perhaps surprise more than one reader to learn that we have experienced great difficulty in laying our hand upon such a representation. It is not, indeed, that we ever thought to find thereby the clue to an enigma which seems to us, as will be seen, susceptible of a much nearer solution. But as little as anyone did we think of denying the Christian analogies of the painting of Turfan, and in any and every case it would have been interesting to connect with it a western counterpart. We went therefore, and knocked at the door of the specialists. We must confess that their reply was not what we expected. They told us, to begin with, that the *Virgo lactans* was not shown in the catacombs of Rome (¹). Even in Byzantine art, with its well-known horror of the nude, the icons of the Γαλακτοτροφοῦσα, charged, perhaps, at first with some indecorum, do not seem to appear until very late, in the XVth century, and would be imitations of an Italian model, itself of recent date (¹). Finally, in France the first examples would not go back further than the XIVth century, and would translate in our religious art new feelings of familiarity and tenderness (²). But even the best established laws must always have some exception, and in the present case M. Gabriel Millet has pointed out to us at least two. The first is furnished by the ivory cover of a Gospel of Metz, attributed to the IXth century of our era (pl. XLVI, 1) : the « Mother of God », thus designated by name in Byzantine sigla, is seated on a raised throne in the form of a coffer, and offers her left bosom, over which she has modestly drawn a fold of her veil, to a child entirely swathed in bands. The other specimen, recently obtained from the excavations of the Service of Egyptian Antiquities at Saqqara, is by the gracious permission of M. G. Maspéro reproduced here (pl. XLVI, 2). Seated on a chair with a back, of rather rude construction, the Virgin Mary no less chastely offers the nipple of her right bosom to a little Jesus, already growing, who, installed on his mother’s knee, holds her forearm with both hands. According to the published information this painting had once adorned the walls of a convent founded in 470 and probably destroyed soon after the Arab conquest of Egypt (640-641). Whilst the Carolingian ivory would be later than the image of Turfan, the Coptic fresco would, therefore, be earlier. But, since — notwithstanding the analogy of the wholes and even of certain details — we discern at once that none of