The Immaculate Virgin on the crescent Moon: an iconography

In thousands of paintings, statues and devotional images the Virgin Mary appears standing on a crescent Moon, hands joined and eyes raised to heaven. This is the iconography of the Immaculate Conception, which took shape between the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century and spread enormously, above all in the Spanish world. The Moon at the Virgin's feet has a precise origin in the Bible and a long history of interpretation.

The woman clothed with the sun

The main source is chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, which describes a great sign appearing in heaven: «a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet», crowned with twelve stars. In the text the woman gives birth to a son threatened by a dragon. Christian exegetes interpreted her as an image of the Church and, more and more often, of the Virgin Mary.

To this source was added a verse from the Song of Songs, read by tradition in a Marian sense, which celebrates the bride as «fair as the moon, clear as the sun». The Moon beneath the woman's feet was explained in various ways: as a symbol of the changeable world over which the Virgin rules, as a sign of her purity, or as a triumph over the ancient lunar deities, first among them the Diana of the pagans.

The rules of Francisco Pacheco

In seventeenth-century Spain devotion to the Immaculate Conception, the doctrine that Mary was preserved from original sin from the moment of her conception, was especially intense, although it was not yet dogma. In Seville the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco, teacher and father-in-law of Velázquez, codified the way to depict it in his treatise Arte de la pintura, published in 1649.

Pacheco recommended painting Mary as a very young girl, in a white tunic and blue mantle, her head surrounded by stars and the Moon beneath her feet. He also discussed the position of the crescent, suggesting that its points should face downwards, with an argument inspired by the astronomy of the time. Not all painters followed the advice, but the model prevailed in Spanish and colonial workshops.

From Velázquez to Murillo

The young Velázquez painted around 1618-1619 an Immaculate Conception now in the National Gallery in London, in which the Moon appears as a transparent sphere beneath the Virgin's feet. Decades later Bartolomé Esteban Murillo became the painter of the Immaculate par excellence: his luminous Virgins, borne up by clouds and angels, such as the so-called Soult Immaculate in the Prado, fixed the image that is still familiar today.

In Italy Guido Reni painted in 1627 an Immaculate Conception now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But the most surprising example remains that of Cigoli, who in Rome, in the Pauline Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, placed beneath the Virgin's feet a Moon with craters and relief, inspired by the observations of his friend Galileo. In 1854 Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception with the bull Ineffabilis Deus.

The crescent Moon beneath Mary's feet is thus the meeting point of different traditions: the apocalyptic vision, biblical poetry, the iconographic legacy of the ancient Moon goddesses and even the new science. Few symbols show as clearly how a religious image can gather and transform, over the centuries, meanings very distant from one another.