“Picturing Mary” is the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in years, and given its subject — images of the Virgin Mary — it is likely to be one of its most popular as well. It opens in the middle of the Christmas season, when the subject of Mary is particularly resonant, and it includes more than 60 works, some of them by the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance and baroque eras, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dürer. If this show, which opens Friday, doesn’t fill the museum’s galleries with throngs of visitors, nothing will.
The subject is vast, and doing it justice in one exhibition is impossible. One might organize such a show based on the archetypal narrative moments in Mary’s life — the Annunciation, the Pieta, the Assumption — that have inspired artists for centuries.
