Holding the Child: Mothers, Madonnas and Loss
Fri, Oct 23
|Foundling Museum & Online
From the idealised tenderness of the Madonna and Child to the realities of childbirth, motherhood and infant mortality, this lecture explores how Renaissance artists represented the experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood.
Time & Location
Oct 23, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Foundling Museum & Online, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ, UK
About the Event
Beginning with the foundation of the Foundling Museum and its origins in the Foundling Hospital, established by Thomas Coram in 1739, we will consider the long history of institutions created to care for vulnerable children. We will also look further back to Florence’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, founded in 1419, and reflect on the dangers surrounding childbirth in earlier centuries.
The idealised images of the Madonna and Child offered powerful visions of maternal love and divine protection, yet some Renaissance paintings also contain an awareness of suffering and loss, with the Madonna appearing to foresee her son’s ultimate fate. These works were often made for domestic settings and may have been viewed particularly by women—making their idealised representations of motherhood potentially complex or even painful for those unable to have children.
We will also examine a fascinating group of late-sixteenth-century portraits depicting pregnant women, exploring what these rare images reveal about…