Madonna met kind en Johannes de Doper 1618 - 1655

This etching of the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist was made by Cornelis Schut in the 17th century. In this small but rich image, Schut unites familiar religious iconography in order to assert a specific theological position. The Virgin Mary is shown with the infant Christ, while the young John the Baptist affectionately embraces a lamb, a clear reference to Christ as the Lamb of God. Schut was from Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands, an area with deep ties to the Counter-Reformation movement. The visual codes of the artwork are thus designed to reaffirm the core doctrines of the Catholic Church and encourage religious devotion. As art historians, we can investigate the institutional history of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands, researching the kinds of devotional images that were being produced at the time, and the audiences that were intended to receive them. Through understanding the work’s historical context, we can get a sense of the kind of cultural and religious work that it performed.