THE final canto of Dante’s “Paradiso” opens with euphoric praise not for the Son or the Father or even the Spirit, but the Mother:

Virgin mother, daughter of your son

Humbler and higher than any other creature…

You are she who so ennobled human nature

That nature’s very maker did not disdain

To himself be made by you.

The lines are an apt expression of the manifold contradictions embodied in the Christian mythology of Mary. “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea”, a new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, sets out to explore these contradictions and their evolution in Christian religious imagery. The show brings together more than 60 works of Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, many on view in America for the first time. Western art abounds with paintings and sculptures of the Virgin; indeed, until the 18th century, she was the single most frequently depicted female figure. But it is unusual to see so many together, organised not around a style or a period but the simple idea of Mary herself. She is an idea that changes markedly over the centuries. Her myriad titles give some indication of this: Virgin of Virgins, Holy Mother of God, Queen of all Saints, Queen of Mercy, Queen of Peace. A list on a wall of the exhibit goes on. But even as Mary’s representations shift to emphasise different facets of her role in Christian history, her essential qualities remain the same: faithfulness, devotion, humility, purity. Pre-Renaissance Mary is represented as queenly: ennobled, enthroned, surrounded by angels and engulfed in celestial light. In the late Middle Ages she becomes more approachable, appearing more often in the garb of an unassuming peasant. The humanist conception of Mary gained further traction in the Renaissance: she is less empress of heaven, more mother—sewing, nursing and playing with the infant Jesus. It is a representation that is crucial to the doctrine of Jesus’s “authentic humanity”: Mary is his link to human nature and earthly experience. Engaged in these quintessentially female activities, she also provides the archetype of Christian womanhood. But even in the most unadorned depictions of Madonna and child, the halo is omnipresent. She is no ordinary woman, but that impossible ideal compared with which all other women must ever fall short: the perfect mother and the perfect virgin.

During the Counter-Reformation, Mary is returned to her seat of power. Catholic artists, responding to the Protestant minimisation of her part in humanity’s salvation, re-emphasised her position as mother of God. She also takes on a growing role of her own in the lives of the faithful, as the supreme intercessor between her son and those who worship him. What is remarkable, across all these depictions, is that Mary almost never gazes at the viewer. Her eyes are invariably downcast, suggesting solemnity, a soul turned inward, and the tragic foreknowledge of her son’s fate. The exhibition describes this look as expressive of her humility, though another word for it would be submissive; it evokes the age-old notion that a woman’s direct gaze is impure.

And though the exhibit takes pains to represent Mary as “a protagonist in her own rich life story”, the images underscore the sense in which her story is marked, above all, by lack of agency. It’s hard to see her story as her own so much as the one that was written for her.

At turns, it is a story that is over-written. Every artist painting a scene from Mary’s life layers it with another, either from her own life or from biblical history. A painting of the Annunciation, the scene of Mary’s great moment of obedience ("Behold the handmaid of the Lord"), incorporates allusions to Eve’s disobedience in Eden. Another includes Moses’s burning bush: it burned but was not consumed by flames, evoking the same divine paradox by which Mary conceived a child yet remained a virgin. Then there’s the garland of roses on the Mother’s head, destined to become her son’s crown of thorns. And, of course, images of the infant in Mary’s arms foreshadow the Pietà, Mary cradling Christ’s body after the crucifixion.

This is a life drenched in symbolism. The exhibit gestures vaguely to the notion that artists built on an ancient tradition by which female figures personified abstract ideals. But it would have been helpful to include some representations of the earlier female icons and deities from which the Christian Mother arose. After all, she did not step from the spiritual ocean fully formed. There are the fertility goddesses from the ancient cults in Egypt and Babylonia and the earth mother of Asia Minor, worshipped under varying names and guises. And before the cult of Mary, there was the cult of another virgin—Artemis. It gradually transformed, with the growth of Christianity, into the veneration of the Virgin that Christians recognise today.

"Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea" is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, until April 12th 2015

The painting shows "Madonna of the Goldfinch", circa 1767-1770, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo