See Amma, A Renaissance Painting!

Blessed be the mother, by all her many names.

Like moths to a flame, we found ourselves gawking at the painting, Madonna con Bambino by Sandro Botticelli, the Italian Renaissance maestro. This striking 1490 CE painting is the focus of One Mother, Many Mother Tongues at the Bengaluru branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art.

The on-going exhibition is a collaboration between the governments of India and Italy, which brings together 26 artworks from provincial museums and private collections of both countries. One Mother, Many Mother Tongues plays out as a conversation between the co-curators – professor Naman Ahuja of Jawaharlal Nehru University and Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre – tracing the worship of the mother goddess across the two cultures.

Significant mother

Our first impression of the exhibit: the sombre, sobering spatial design of the gallery space. It deepens this dialogue between the two traditions of divine mother worship. The whisper of lighting, the rounded, charcoal-grey walls, the capsule-shape of the contained space echoes architectural elements kindred to Italy’s beautiful basilicas of Mother Mary and India’s sacred shrines of the Matrikas, the fierce but fostering cult of divine mothers. Here, at the centre of a curved wall, Botticelli’s Madonna con Bambino is the only painting; the others are sculptures from both cultures ranging in size, imposing and intricate.

It’s the brilliance of the colours, even after all of these centuries, that makes this Botticelli beauty stand out. Mary and the Christ child are at the centre of the painting’s composition. Her face is angled, her eyes are heavy-lidded, serenely gazing upon her child. While the Christ child is turned away, his eyes with a touch of melancholia look outside of the frame into the distant future – towards us? This perfect pair is placed in front of a criss-crossing pillar with gargoyles and a parapet – a peek of the picturesque cityscape in the far distance. “It’s like Mother Mary and the Christ Child are on the cross too,” says Naman, the co-curator, on our media walkthrough.

He was speaking to the embedded symbolism of the painting that hints at the dreadful destiny of this divine duo. Naman also draws our attention to her scarlet robe that suggests blood, or the shade of blue of her cape alluding to the night sky. Pulling us closer, he points to the faint lines of stars and the cosmos as further evidence of this line of meaning-making. These choices couched into this Christian painting aren’t happenstance, Naman assures us, but rather a painterly distilling of the primal symbols of mother goddess worship that are hardwired into most cultures. Another easter egg: the compassionate, crying face of this Madonna, one of the 80 others of the pair painted by Botticelli, shares “the exact same female model” as Boticelli’s other beauties – The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both hang at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Gneiss moms

Our eyes and minds trained to unknot the codes of the exhibition, the sculptures of the mothers reveal their secrets to us. While Boticelli’s Madonna con Bambino portrays motherhood as compassionate and resilient, diametrically opposite, the curatorial team unsettles these ideas with a two-foot-tall stone statue of Chamunda on loan from the National Museum, New Delhi. Seated, skeletal, serpentine, this 11th–12th century sculpture of a mother goddess from Bengal is fierce, feisty and “will kill anyone who tries to kill her child,” Naman says. At this exhibition, One Mother, Many Mother Tongues, these artworks from a century apart are intentionally placed together to reflect on our complicated relationships with the figures of motherhood.

This diversity in the depiction of goddesses across the two cultures drives home our never-ending, collective fascination with the symbol of the mother across centuries and centuries. Then, there’s the Skanda Mata, still sublime, despite disfigurement. This is a two-foot-tall matrika sculpture from Taneshwar Mahadev in Udaipur from the collection of the Government Musuem, City Palace in Udaipur. It exquisitely captures the seemingly effortless, lyrical style of stone-work from the post-Gupta period. Beautifully cradled by her jutting hip and arms, the baby plays with a rattle in his outstretched fist. It’s a snapshot in stone of a sweet, shared moment. There’s Indrani, a three-foot marble statue, that showcases another playful, tender moment. In this figure from a 9th century saptamatrika set borrowed from the museology department of the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, the mother goddess carefully raises her child to pluck a flower from a heavy branch. Another deity from the saptamatrika set, Vrishabha Yogini, a bull-headed, seated female goddess with a roaring lion at her feet holding Ganesha, the elephant-headed god. This sandstone figure from the Indian Museum in Kolkata stands as an allegory for the steadying effects of wisdom over the untamed, wild mind.

In the exhibit One Mother, Many Mother Tongues, there are caring and calm mothers. There are bold, blood-thirsty matriarchs marked out with a red paint at their bases “to speak to the rituals of animal sacrifice at their temples.” These powerful, protective matrons are intriguing, eye-catching, and commanding. From the headless Hariti from the Kushan Era in India to the nearly life-size Mater Matutas from the 3rd–4th century BCE in Rome, Italy, it seems the figure of the mother will always be loved, feared, and worshipped.

Some mother time

But the curators aren’t simply satisfied with placing mothers on a pedestal. As we’re leaving the hallowed, holy grounds of the mother goddesses, we’re stopped in our tracks by a tiny ivory figure labelled Mother and female child from the TAPI Collection by private collectors Praful and Shilpa Shah.

Unlike the imposing nature of the other sculptures, this one is more of an everyday scene. A mother stands in tribhanga, a standing stance where the body bends in three places in a ‘S’ shape. With one hand, she holds onto the cane basket with her bejewelled daughter atop her head. With the other one, she’s pulling up her draped fabric slipping off her bountiful hips. “This is a charming image of seduction by accident; like a comic scene frozen in time,” says Naman. She, a human mother, stands outside of the capsule-shaped, holy enclosure of the divinities, “on the margins, walking among us,” he adds.

Different mothers, so dear to us all.

The details: One Mother, Many Mother Tongues is on display till 20th September at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru. Tuesday-Friday, 10am – 6pm & Saturday-Sunday, 11am – 8pm. The standard admission fee applies to visitors aged above 18 years.

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