BLACK MADONNA (aka Black Virgin), a term that generally refers to statues or paintings in Western Christendom of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, where both figures are depicted as Black. The Black Madonna can be found in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox regions, although many of these paintings are actually icons of Byzantine origin or style, produced in thirteenthor fourteenth-century Italy. Other examples from the Middle East or Africa, particularly Egypt and Ethiopia, may be even older.
The existence of multiple Black depictions of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus has been the source of anguish for many in the Anglo-Western world, with its predominant practices of Christianity. As a result, the Black Madonna is not often talked about, and contemporary scholarship on her is scant despite hundreds of preserved records. In this sense, she has been banished to an obscure existence or disinherited, left unacknowledged, except as an unintentional representation. In his 1985 study The Cult of the Black Virgin, Ean Begg writes of a telling instance of this constructed invisibility: “In 1944, Leonard W. Moss, entering the church at Lucera in Southern Italy, came across his first Black Virgin and asked the priest, ‘Father, why is the Madonna black?’ The response was, ‘My son, she is black because she is black.’ [...] The priest’s answer to Moss may seem a charming example of holy simplicity. Still, there was no mistaking the open hostility when, on December 28, 1952, as Moss and [Stephen C.] Cappannari presented their paper on Black Virgins to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, every priest and nun in the audience walked out.”
When faced with the presence of the Black Madonna, the institutions of White Christianity have tended also to invoke the historical process of aging caused by exposure to smoke or other elements. However, the fallacy of such claims is made clear by the fact that, in general, only the Virgin Mary’s complexion is found to be dark while her garb remains untouched by the darkening processes supposedly attributed to age. Historically, Mary is among the few saints ever represented as Black. Despite the persistent and intentional efforts by the institutions of White knowledge, including the Church, to forcibly obscure her powerful Blackness, the Black Madonna continues to be imbued by stories of resistance against White sterilized visions of the world.