's
Diana and Callisto, 1559, shows the moment when
Callisto's pregnancy is discovered. In Europe, depictions of pregnancy were largely avoided in
classical art (apart from small
votive figures), but later Western art had two subjects that were frequently depicted where pregnancy was integral to the narrative.
Callisto In
Greek mythology the nymph
Callisto became pregnant by
Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans) in disguise. Her pregnancy was spotted when she was bathing, and her furious mistress
Artemis (Diana) sent her away; Jupiter's wife
Juno then turned her into a bear. The few classical depictions tended to show this transformation, but in later art the traumatic moment of discovery was most often depicted, especially from the Renaissance onwards, using the Roman poet
Ovid as the source. What became the typical composition was first seen in
Titian's
Diana and Callisto (1559), where Callisto's abdomen is exposed as Artemis/Diana points accusingly at her and her other followers display a variety of reactions. though it could be claimed that it illustrated the serious consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.
Virgin Mary Depictions of
Mary were by far the most frequent images featuring a pregnant woman in post-classical Western art, and probably remain so to the modern day. The moment of Mary's conception of Jesus, called the
Annunciation, is
one of the most common subjects in traditional Christian art, but depictions from later in her pregnancy are also common. Unlike many other kinds of depictions of pregnancy, there is usually no ambiguity as to whether Mary is intended to be shown while pregnant, even where the pregnancy is not clearly visualized. '' by
Rogier van der Weyden (1430s, now
Leipzig) with open laces on Elizabeth The
Visitation, a meeting between two pregnant women, Mary and
Elizabeth, as recorded in the
Gospel of Luke , was very often depicted, but their pregnancy is usually not emphasized visually, at least until
Early Netherlandish painting of the 15th century. Medieval thinking held that Elizabeth was about seven months pregnant at the meeting, and Mary about one. The loose full clothes used in religious art, as in normal medieval life, make it hard to detect in any case. In late medieval paintings they may be shown with vertical gaps in their clothes; female medieval dress had openings that were normally closed by laces when dressing, but could be left open during pregnancy. These may be either at the front or the sides, and are used in art to indicate pregnancy, although from about 1450 such gaps, revealing a contrasting colour of undergarment, became a fashion and can be seen in art on slim, unmarried women. There are a few images of Joseph and Mary looking for shelter or being turned away at the inn in
Bethlehem, mostly from north of the Alps after 1500; in these Mary is usually clearly pregnant. The rare subject of the
Doubting of Joseph also needed to establish Mary's pregnancy, and some versions indicated this by unlaced openings in her dress or a "cutaway" unborn Jesus. In this scene, based on and
apocryphal elaborations, Joseph is unsettled by the pregnancy of his virgin bride, but is later reassured by an angel who comes to him in a dream, the first of his
four dreams in Matthew. Mary is often shown spinning while pregnant; the spinning figure with "cutaway" illustrated has Joseph's head appearing through the tracery at left. In a similar painting in
Budapest, where Mary spun while Joseph slept and the angel appeared to him, the unborn Jesus is not visible in the painting now, but can be seen in the
underdrawing with
infrared reflectography. Either the artist or patron had a change of mind at the time, or it was overpainted later, perhaps as the motif came to be felt indecorous or primitive. Other similar images are of Mary alone, especially as statues; these are called
Maria gravida ("Pregnant Mary") and are covered below. '' by
Piero della Francesca, c. 1460, with unlacing at the front and side A number of Early Netherlandish paintings show
Mary Magdalene with the same unlaced opening in her dress. Penny Howell Jolly has proposed that this motif represents her "spiritual pregnancy", although in his account of the most famous example,
The Descent from the Cross by van der Weyden (c. 1435, now
Prado)
Lorne Campbell notes the unlacing, but attributes it merely to Mary Magdalene's distressed condition. These attracted the devotions of pregnant women or those concerned for them, as well as those wanting a pregnancy. Queen
Claude of France, who had seven children before dying at the age of 24, had the painting of the
Visitation by
Sebastiano del Piombo (now
Louvre) in her chamber. A few of these images of Mary feature a "cutaway" view of Jesus
in utero within, as found in some images of the
Visitation (see above), In
Eastern Orthodox icons, the
in utero Jesus, which is normally fully clothed, remains part of the tradition for certain representations to the present day. It is found in one of the most famous
Russian icons, the 12th-century
Ustyug Annunciation in the
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, which has the birth-size Child shown inside the chest area, and in the icons of Mary of the type known as
Pomozhenie rodam in Russian, translated as "Help in childbirth" (or "Succour in travail"). File:Bregenz Martinskapelle Fresken 05.jpg|Fresco
Doubting of Joseph, 1360. An angel appears to the sleeping Joseph, next to an enthroned Mary. File:Master of Erfurt, The Virgin Weaving, Upper Rhine, ca 1400 (Berlin).jpg|German
Doubting of Joseph, c. 1400, with Mary spinning and "cutaway" unborn Jesus File:Antependium Straßburg c1410 makffm 6810 image02.jpg|Tapestry
Visitation, with the two "cutaway" children, c. 1410.
John the Baptist kneels to Jesus, who blesses him. File:Marx Reichlich - Meeting of Mary and Elisabeth - WGA19048.jpg|Early 16th-century Austrian
Visitation where the pregnancies are unusually clear, even without the
in utero figures File:Angelico, visitazione da predella annunciazioe di cortona.jpg|
Fra Angelico, a more typical
Visitation without much visual indication of the pregnancies File:Vierge enceinte, Galerie nationale, Prague.JPG|
Maria Gravida,
International Gothic, perhaps originally with
in utero Jesus File:Mestre Pero Virgem do Ó Igreja S M Alcáçova Montemor-o-Velho IMG 1067.jpg|One of several Portuguese
Maria Gravida figures, with the protective hand on the stomach File:Schwangere Maria aus Cham ZG detail.jpg|"Cutaway" unborn Jesus, from a Swiss altarpiece of 1505 File:15th-century unknown painters - Madonna del Parto - WGA23928.jpg|Unusually large
Madonna del Parto, 15th century, Italy File:Maria7849a (cropped).jpg|Baroque
Maria gravida with the
Christogram "IHS" on her stomach
Portraits , c. 1595 In the
Late Medieval Period, portraits of pregnant-looking women began to be painted, though the fashion for dresses gathered at the front makes these difficult to interpret or identify with confidence. The
Arnolfini portrait by
Jan van Eyck of 1434 might be an example of pregnancy, but the current views of art historians are mostly against this, as virgin saints were often shown in much the same way. The virgin martyr and "princess" Saint
Catherine of Alexandria, usually dressed in the height of fashion in this period, was also the
patron saint of childbirth, so there may be a degree of deliberate ambiguity in images of her. Some Italian Renaissance portraits thought to be of pregnant women show them wearing a gauzy underdress called a
guarnello, often associated with pregnancy or the period after childbirth. These include
Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona Lisa, where the garment first became visible under
infra-red scans in 2006, suggesting that
Lisa del Giocondo, the sitter, was pregnant or just had a baby when she was painted. Another painting with a
guarnello is
Botticelli's
Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Brandini, where the sitter also holds a hand over the top of her bump. This is a feature seen in many images such as
Visitation scenes where pregnancy is certain, and that probably indicates it in cases where it is much less clear, including some portraits by
Anthony van Dyck.
La Donna Gravida ("The Pregnant Lady") by
Raphael is another example, with an apparently pregnant woman sitting with her left hand over her stomach, but such depictions remained infrequent in
Renaissance art. An exception to this is the "pregnancy portrait" (a term first used by Karen Hearn, a
Tate Britain curator) of a woman shown as heavily pregnant, usually standing. These are especially found in England, where the fashion may have been popularized in about the 1590s by
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, an English painter of Flemish parentage, who was the leading English painter of these portraits. Part of the reason for them may have been the risk to the mother of childbirth and some may well be posthumous. There are some earlier examples from court portraiture on the Continent, and in England, but the main group of English portraits dates from roughly the late 1580s to about 1630. At around the same time as the English examples
Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain sent portraits of herself while pregnant to close female friends and relations. The example illustrated below by her court painter
Bartolomé González y Serrano, which was sent back home to the Austrian Habsburgs, only varies her standard official portrait by exchanging her daughter for the usual dog or chair at the left, and bringing out her dress at the front. Probably no fresh posing for the artist was necessary. Her daughter,
Anne of Austria, Queen of France, was herself painted when 8 months pregnant with the future
Louis XIV, born 23 years into her marriage. The portrait of their unfortunate cousin, Holy Roman Empress
Maria Leopoldine of Austria, who died in childbirth at 16 in 1649, the year the portrait is dated, is perhaps a posthumous adaptation of her wedding portrait. by an artist of the
Argunov family, 1803. She died in childbirth, so the painting may be a posthumous version of an earlier head and shoulders. Later portraits of pregnant women tended to be family members or at least friends of the artists; relatively few women, or their husbands, chose to commission expensive portraits (often only done once in a lifetime) showing them pregnant, although many women spent most of at least the early years of their married life pregnant. The most common moment for a woman to have her portrait painted was just after her marriage, when any suggestion of pregnancy would be unwanted. In some well-documented cases, the subjects of portraits can be shown to be well into pregnancy when the portrait was painted, but this is "suppressed" or "concealed" in the image. It was a relatively simple matter for a portraitist to remove or add a pregnant belly to a painting. Several of the paintings (which are not portraits, though no doubt models from his circle were used) of
Vermeer have been said to show pregnant women, but specialists mostly discount this. One specialist was not aware of any portrait showing a pregnant woman from the whole of
Dutch Golden Age painting. Though examples of pregnancy in Dutch art do exist. Most notably in the work of
Jan Steen, who depicted pregnant women in tavern scenes (e.g. 'Tavern scene with a pregnant host' in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) or in his numerous genre paintings concerning sick young women; their sickness usually involved morning sickness. Other examples are Rembrandt's
Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, that shows Oopjen Coppit in a heavily pregnant state, or his drawing of a pregnant woman. More examples are
Hendrick van der Burgh's 'Courtyard Scene with Pregnant Woman' or 'The Doctor's Visit' by
Frans van Mieris the Elder. In contrast to 16th-century styles, "the fashion that had developed by the 1620s was especially helpful for a person trying to hide a swelling belly", even if only in a portrait. In 1904 a portrait of his wife by
Lovis Corinth, dated five days before the birth, shows a profile view that emphasizes the pregnancy. The prolific Corinth painted several pregnant women, many apparently not portraits.
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted herself as pregnant in 1906 before she had ever been so; in the following 18 months she had a daughter, dying three weeks later. There are a number of narrative scenes which show unwanted pregnancies essentially from the father's point of view, including some where the woman has brought the matter before local magistrates to award financial support, as unmarried women were able to do in England (uniquely, according to
Bernard Picart, who poured scorn on the law). The English artist
William Hogarth included many pregnant women in his works, usually with a satirical or comic intention, and generally more often giving a negative implication than a positive one. In Hogarth's
A Woman Swearing a Child to a Grave Citizen (or
The Denunciation, c.1729,
National Gallery of Ireland) a young woman falsely accuses a rich old man of fathering her child, while the real father advises her. The verses on the print version summarize the situation:Here pregnant Madam screens the real Sire,/And falsly swears her Bastard Child for Hire/Upon a Rich old Letcher, who denies/The Fact, and vows the naughty Hussif lies;/His Wife enrag'd, exclaims against her Spouse,/And swears she'l be reveng'd upon his Brows;/The Jade, the Justice and Church Ward'ns agree,/And force him to provide Security. In particular Hogarth depicted a number of pregnant ballad-sellers, and ones with young children. Since the job required little movement, it was perhaps often taken during pregnancy, but Hogarth seems to have reflected a set of contemporary ideas using pregnancy as a metaphor for printing as a means of reproduction.
Hogarth gallery File:William Hogarth 021.jpg|''
A Rake's Progress, 1, The Young Heir Takes Possession Of The Miser's Effects'', abandoning his pregnant fiancée File:Hogarth-Harlot-4.png|From ''
A Harlot's Progress'', 1732. The background prisoners include a pregnant black woman, perhaps a prostitute. File:The enraged musician; a street crowd with a ballad singer is Wellcome V0049245.jpg|
The Enraged Musician, with a pregnant ballad-seller at left File:Hogarth's Evening.jpg|
Evening, from the
Four Times of Day. The cow's horns over the husband suggest he has been cuckolded. File:William-Hogarth-The-March-of-the-Guards-to-Finchley-1750-©-The-Foundling-Museum.jpg|
The March of the Guards to Finchley, 1749–50, with soldier and pregnant ballad-seller in foreground. Her basket has copies of "
God Save the King".
Modern "),
Gustav Klimt, 1907-08 As the modern era approached, some artists began to show pregnancy more explicitly, with heavily pregnant figures, and more pregnant nudes than before. Two paintings (not portraits as such) by
Gustav Klimt,
Hope I (1903) and
Hope II (1907–08), show slim, heavily pregnant women in profile. In
Hope I the figure is nude, and the pregnancy very evident,
Pregnant woman was the most famous painting in a series of paintings of seven pregnant
nude women painted by
Alice Neel.
Pregnant girl was a painting of 1960–61 by
Lucian Freud that portrayed his then girlfriend Bernadine Coverley, when she was pregnant with their daughter Bella. There have been nude sculptures of heavily pregnant women by, among others,
Damien Hirst, with
The Virgin Mother (now at
Lever House in New York) and
Verity, 2012, and
Ron Mueck, whose
Pregnant Woman (2002) is a 2.5-metre-tall sculpture of a naked pregnant woman clasping her hands above her head, now in the
National Gallery of Australia. ==Medical illustration==