Farrago Miscellanea

The Virgin Mary in this composition is known as ‘Maria Sempre Nimica del Peccato’ or ‘Our Lady, Always the Enemy of Sin’. It depicts the Christ Child piercing a serpent’s head with a javelin-annex-cross. The specific iconographic identity of this Madonna has been overlooked by the auctioneers, perhaps due to the damage to the painted surface, as it shows the Virgin without her attribute, the lightning bolt. Curiously, not only the thunderbolt but also parts of her invocation, “MARIA” and the first three letters of ‘SEMpre’, have been abraded.

This iconography is a variant of the ‘Madonna del Fulmine’, which shows Our Lady of (Succour against) Lightning among lightning bolts. Especially venerated in Sardinia as the ‘Birgini de su raju’, she is invoked to “Free this whole country from the scourge of the storms of lightning of the earthquake and from every evil.” The Madonna of Sant’Agata, however, holds a single flame in her hand, and is called upon to protect small children from the onslaughts of the evil one, which is also congruent with the serpent slayer motif.* Here, the Madonna does not as much serve as a protective ‘lightning rod’ but rather as a wielder of thunderbolts, similar to the Greek God Zeus, as the prototype proves. 

Another almost identical version of the Madonna del Fulmine of the Campanian type ― although without the invocative inscription ― can be found at the southernmost tip of the Italian mainland in Santa Maria di Leuca, Puglia: https://lnkd.in/eDdPtU5d. Even the shape of her attribute resembles Jupiter’s bundle of flames with ↯-shaped bolts ejecting from both ends. (Incidentally, that other Virgin, the goddess Athena, was born from the head of her father Zeus.) Although the lightning bolt had an evil-repelling (apotropaic) function and also refers to the Second Coming of Jesus (Mt. 24:27, Lk. 17:24), someone apparently took offence at this pagan attribute and removed it.

*) Christ piercing the serpent refers to Isaiah 27:1: “a strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent” According to John Chrysotom, the cross is “a weapon of victory” (Ps.[109] PG 55.274) “in Christ’s hand to fight against the devil” (Hom.13.1; Phil. PG 62.277); either “to cut off the dragon’s head” (Mt. PG 58.537) or to “pierce” it (De coem. et cruc. 2, PG 49.396). Already in Early Christianity, the cross lance was used as an image of the power of the Cross, as is the case with the labarum, the military standard with the Chi-Rho (☧) symbol on top, shown in depictions of the emperor Constantine piercing the dragon (Euseb. V Const. 3.3.1).
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