Mary’s transparent beauty in St. Bernard’s aesthetics

Abstract

The subject of the beauty of the Virgin Mary was a delicate one in medieval aesthetic thought. Halfway between the sacred and the profane, the theological and the anthropological, the question of Mary’s beauty opened up a strictly material dimension of appreciation that could generate problems related to decorum. However, the progressive humanization of Marian images from the thirteenth century onwards invites us to wonder if there was not, after all, a way to balance or, better, to sublimate the immaterial beauty of Mary, Mother of God, and material beauty of Mary, the young virgin of Nazareth. Taking as our leitmotiv a fictional scene from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, we will analyze St. Bernard’s position on this issue, because he was particularly influential on this matter in his own time and later, since his work brings together not only Marian concerns of deep theological depth, but also aesthetic questions that can contribute to clarifying this question.