A painting full of meaning with a pair of severed feet
DURING MY CHILDHOOD, my parents took my sister and me to Florence (Italy) every year. We spent a great deal of our time there looking at renaissance and earlier paintings. Apart from their beauty, my father was particularly interested in the symbolic meanings of things included in the paintings. On a recent visit to the chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, we saw a painting that reminded me of my father’s love of interpreting symbols in old paintings of religious subjects.
The painting is “Madonna in the Rosary” painted by Gert van Lon, who was born in Geseke, Germany in about 1465. The painting was created between 1512 and 1520 for a nunnery in the German town of Soest. The crowned Madonna and Child is surrounded by an oval frame of painted roses. There is a pair of angels in the top left and right corners of the picture, and two kneeling nuns (holding rosaries) in the lower left and right corners. The thing that both puzzled and surprised me are two severed feet, each with their toes pointing at the nuns. Each foot has a red spot, denoting a wound made by a nail on the Cross. Each foot has been depicted as if it had been cleanly and recently sawn from the legs to which they were attached.
In an article published about this painting in The Burlington Magazine (June 2012) by Jean Michel Massing and Aurélie Petiot, the severed feet are representations of the wounds of Christ. The baby Jesus is held in the Madonna’s left hand and there is a bowl of cherries in her right hand. According to the authors of the article:
“In religious symbolism the cherry stands for the heavenly reward for piety, while its sweet-sourness alludes, in typological terms, to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin.Mother and Child…”
And the garlands of roses surrounding the Virgin and Child represent Hail Marys. They are separated by the feet, already mentioned, and by a pair of hands that also represent Christ’s wounds. Each of the sawn-off hands has a nail wound. My late father, who subscribed to The Burlington for many years, would have loved explaining all of this to us.
The painting, so I learned from the article, was donated to King’s College by Charles Robert Ashbee
(1863–1942). He was an architect, social reformer, designer, and important member of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He had studied as an undergraduate at King’s College between 1883 and 1886. It was Ashbee who designed the wooden frame surrounding the painting.
Although I have visited King’s College Chapel many times, it was only on my recent visit in August 2023 that I first noticed Gert van Lon’s painting that is both beautiful and full of meaning.
