New Delhi: The over-three-foot figure of Mater Matuta from Italy, made in the 4th century BC with a child in her lap, evokes a feeling similar to the tiny 7-centimetre Harappan mother-and-child figure from around 2500 BC.
Similarly, the image of Skanda Mata from 6th century AD Udaipur, carrying a child on her hip, is not markedly different from Sandro Botticelli's evocative 'Madonna and Child' from 15th-century Florence.
Separated by centuries, geography and context, these works come together in the exhibition 'One Mother, Many Mother Tongues' at Humayun's Tomb Museum in Delhi, where 27 objects explore one of human history's most universal visual narratives — the mother and child.
Organised by the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, the exhibition brings together figures and images of the mother and child — from the votive figures of Mater Matuta in ancient Rome to the representations of Hariti in the Indian subcontinent, and the Madonnas of the Renaissance.
The exhibition also draws from diverse Indian traditions, including yoginis, saptamatrikas and the non-religious matrika (mother) figures from the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD.
"These statues are iconic and representative of diverse traditions of motherhood. The image can sometimes look the same, but if you study it a little more, you'll realise that it is actually communicating a different religion or a different cult or sub-cult," Naman Ahuja, art historian and co-curator of the exhibition, told PTI.
If the statues of Mater Matuta, produced in central Italy between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE, present an intimate image of motherhood while "embodying a principle at once cosmic and civic", according to the wall text, Hariti from the Buddhist tradition, once a child-stealing demon, was converted by the Buddha into a benevolent guardian.
The two images, across India and Central Asia, share a formal resonance in their "frontal stillness, the seated authority, and above all the centrality of the maternal body as a generative and symbolic locus".
"So you get many mother tongues and a lot of diversity which seems to be united under a common rubric of looking at the same kind of image," Ahuja added.
At some temples, the matrikas are developed into a fixed set of either seven (saptamatrika), eight (ashtamatrika) or even up to 64 yoginis, the wall text reads.
While Botticelli's 'Madonna and Child' establishes "a delicacy of gesture and restrained tenderness... that intensifies the sacred dimension," several protective matrikas like Jyeshtha from 8th century AD Tamil Nadu and the goat-headed mother goddess from the 1st century BC project a fiercely protective figure for children.
Through sculptures, paintings and visual juxtapositions, the exhibition demonstrates how the archetype of the mother and child evolves "without ever dissolving, adapting itself to the symbolic languages of different cultures".
While the exhibition recognises the universal narrative of "motherhood as an originating act," it also asks if "motherhood is the only rubric under which the feminine is granted agency".
"Are all ancient images of the feminine made only because they are one or another kind of mother goddess? Do we have enough examples that celebrate the baby girl or are all those swaddled babies boys? What forces in society promoted these depictions of little boys with their mother goddesses?" Ahuja asked.
He invited viewers to note that "not all the images subscribe to the cliche of the benign, playful or compassionate role that we give women as mothers".
"These mothers don't just give birth physically to babies, but they are yoginis, they are dasamahavidyas who also give birth to ideas, they give birth to speech, they give birth to cognition," he said.
The exhibition runs until August 8.
