In the summer of 2008, Massachusetts was in the process of codifying the law that protects the right to breastfeed in public and Apple had just released the iPhone 3. I had just moved back to the Boston area and was an enthusiastic proponent of each.

I revisited the Gardner that summer and, beginning with the French Madonna at the end of the Chinese Loggia, I could not help but notice all of the Madonnas (more on that another time) particularly those caught suckling. I sent several photos to new colleagues, laughing at the irony that not only did Isabella Stewart Gardner – ever a Boston instigator – have no problem highlighting breastfeeding, but neither did centuries of artists and their patrons!

A Madonna with exposed breast, “Virgo Lactans”, is a theme in religious painting popular across Christendom between the 12th and 16th centuries meant to illustrate Christ’s humanity and Mary’s humility. They can also be quite personal and intimate. There is very little nudity depicted in the Victorian and Edwardian era galleries of the ISGM (relatively few draped ancients, studies, mythological themes, and in the case of Zorn’s “Morning Toilet” – even with private areas temporarily painted over!); the Mother of God’s bosom seems a special case.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, herself a mother in the 1860’s, likely breastfed her only son before his death by pneumonia at only twenty months. One can only speculate as to her kinship with the idealized mother of Christ – both in tenderness and loss.

Famously, ISG chose to bestow the museum without strings; “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” Without labels; cultural, regional or chronological organization; or ready background information we are left to make our own meaning of the collection. We are invited to interpret with merely the guidance of her choices and their arrangement. But the more we can understand her circumstances empathetically, the more we might come to appreciate and realize her immense gift.

Section 221. (a) A mother may breastfeed her child in any public place or establishment or place which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public and where the mother and her child may otherwise lawfully be present.

– Commonwealth of Massachusetts General Law, 193rd General Court