08/03/2026
It’s World Breastfeeding Week! ( yes this is real) August 1st-August 7th.
“Mary Breastfeeding Baby Jesus”
Referred to in the Latin as “Maria Lactans” or “Madonna del Latte”, in the Orthodox Church called “Galaktotrophousa”, Greek for “the milk giver”
I had many requests to paint an icon of this over the last few years. While doing research we found a great article by David Gibson in 2012, called, “The Missing Christmas Icon: Mary Breastfeeding Jesus.”
Ask anybody what the primary Christian symbol is, and they will most likely say the crucifixion. However, in the early Church it was the lactating Mary, that was the major symbol of God’s love for humanity. In fact, the oldest known image of Mary is from a second Century fresco in a Roman catacomb that shows the infant Jesus “suckling at her exposed breast.”
In the following centuries many iconographers created various versions of the image. By the Middle Ages, the image became very popular. “Lactation Miracles” and “Milk shrines” popped up around the Christian world.
However, during the rise of Protestantism that encouraged a focus on scripture and discouraged the use of images, along with the dawn of movable type and new medical and sexual understandings of the body, a cultural shift was so great that many, even in the Catholic Church, soon came to see the breastfeeding Mary as an “inappropriate” sacred image.
Yet, I think this symbol of Mary nursing Jesus is one of the most beautiful forgotten images of the Advent season and of the incarnation. As Margaret Miles says, “I think there should be a plethora of symbols of God’s love for humanity. Can there be only one way to talk about so great a mystery? No, there can’t”
Signed Prints and Digital Downloads Available: kellylatimoreicons.com
