The Madonna is there, still, motionless. A child hugs her chest, as all children in the world have always done. But she can’t. It fails. Something invisible and powerful holds her still. Its function – breastfeeding, the love that nourishes – is interrupted. It’s an image that sticks in the mind like a wound, Banksy’s latest work: a Madonna unable to feed her child.
The Madonna who cannot breastfeed: Banksy and denied motherhood
It is an ancient gesture, engraved in the history of art and in the collective imagination: the Madonna with the child, the icon of care, of sweetness. Giotto, Raphael, Piero della Francesca: generations of artists have depicted motherhood as an act of grace, a bond that transcends time. But Banksy doesn’t. Banksy digs, breaks down, takes away the voice of the reassuring images and shows us the other side. The Madonna who is unable to breastfeed is not just a religious image: it is a social symbol, a political provocation.
What is Banksy alluding to? Perhaps to the crisis of modern motherhood, to women crushed by the world around them, incapable of fulfilling the roles that society imposes. Perhaps due to the lack of resources, the poverty, the hunger that affects millions of mothers around the world. Perhaps, again, to nature which is no longer able to give. It is our time that speaks, through that work. It is motherhood denied in a world that asks too much and offers too little.
Banksy knows how to hit. He does it with a surprising simplicity, subtracting rather than adding. Here there is no anger, there is no action: there is stalemate, impossibility. The Madonna is the symbol of care, but in her gaze one can read bewilderment. And the child, the one who should have been saved, remains there, waiting for a gesture that will not come.
The location of the work is still unknown. Banksy, as always, plays with anonymity and surprise. But this image, in the silence in which the artist left it, is already traveling around the world. And it will remain imprinted, like an icon of our time: powerful, unresolved, heartbreaking.
