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This chapter looks at the portrayal of Mary, Jesus' mother, in the Gospels and in the Jesus biopics. The films ask two major questions: What was Mary's role in Jesus' infancy and childhood? And, what sort of relationship did Mary and Jesus have in his adulthood? It concludes that Mary's cinematic portrayal is affected by the conventional psychological assumptions of modern western society: the connection between childhood experiences and adult identity, and the notion that one of the marks of a mature adult is the quality of her or his relationship with parents and other family members. Also crucial is the role of Mary in Christian, particularly Catholic, theology. While Mary's role in film may be empowering for some women, she is generally cast in a supportive and secondary role.

Baudelaire thought that, of all contemporary artists, Delacroix alone excelled in the painting of religious subjects, and that he alone ‘sait faire de la religion’. This chapter focuses on a relatively small number of key paintings La Madeleine dans le dé sert, La Mort de Sardanapale, La Lutte de Jacob avec l'ange, Pietà, Les Femmes d'Alger, and Ovide chez les Scythes.

This lecture discusses some of the bitter controversies that arose over the interest levied by many of the Monti. It looks at the efforts that some of them made to avoid any charges at all, and lists the many reasons why Jewish banks survived along with the Monti de Pietà. The author uses the conflict between Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice to begin the chapter. This conflict may symbolise a rivalry between the Jewish and Christian institutions that was still in progress in Shakespeare's day.

The gendered maxim ‘men must work and women must weep’ comes from Charles Kingsley's 1851 ballad 'The Three Fishers'. Virginia Woolf appropriated 'Women Must Weep' for early version of Three Guineas, serialised in The Atlantic Monthly (1938). This chapter argues that the public nature of Woolf’s polemical anti-fascist essay may, concurrently, be read as a more intimate document about personal grief and grievance. For Woolf her sister, Vanessa Bell, was the weeping woman, devastated by the tragic death in 1937 of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War. Duncan Grant drafted posters (reproduced here) to raise money for refugee Spanish children, employing the trope of mothers cradling babies. Woolf’s contemporary, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, a mother bereaved twice by war, repeated the poignant pietà image in numerous anti-war pieces. Picasso, inspired by Dora Maar whom he regarded privately as ‘the weeping woman’, created sixty mater dolorosa works in preparation for his immense elegiac public work, ‘Guernica’ (1937). The chapter traces the powerful aesthetic of the sorrowful mother as a European anti-war figure. It concludes by considering how this iconography has been used cross-culturally and trans-historically. The pietà has been gender-flipped, adapted and plagiarised in war photography, murals, comic books, manga, fashion, film and video.

This introductory chapter begins by considering the September 11 “American Pietà,” a photograph of five rescue workers carrying fatally injured Roman Catholic Priest and New York Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge taken during the 9/11 terror attacks. These five male uniformed first responders put in the place of the Virgin Mother, mark nationalism’s long-standing possession and appropriation of maternal space and visual maternal discourses in states of war and emergency. This book focuses on late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century maternal representations in a variety of visual and textual forms including photography, film, and popular journalism. It reveals the complex relationship between visual intertexts and the sentiments that attend the incorporation and rejection of racialized bodies within contexts of death and remembering.