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First, let's look at two famous Madonna and Child classical paintings. The first one is the Madonna and Child by the “Master of the Straus Madonna,”1 now at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I saw it recently in Rome at Palazzo Barberini. I was intrigued and surprised by the gaze that mother and child exchange.
The mother's eyes express her knowledge of the fatal destiny of the child, but I gave myself the liberty of imagining something else: that, on the contrary, staying with a lay interpretation, it reflected more her distress, sadness, and anger (see Winnicott [1949] and the 17 reasons a mother has to hate her baby). Here is the detail:
Now, let's look at the painting by Filippo Lippi, Virgin with Child , in Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence. What is curious about it is that — unlike the many paintings that have the same subject as the so-called “sacred conversation,” or scenes of children held in mother's arms, or breastfeeding, or staring at their mother's eyes — here, mother and child are ecstatically lost in tactile contact, cheek to cheek, or, rather, skin to skin. This is a contact that does not rest on the need for nutrition. Lippi's masterpiece perfectly illustrates Ogden's (1994) hypothesis regarding the place where the first glimmer of subjectivity and, therefore, of relationality is born in the child: in the area where the child's cheek is in contact with the mother's breast, starting from the sensation of the calming quality that is produced there.