Motherhood I: Preparation

Our attitudes, thoughts and feelings about motherhood, children and the mother–child relationship are shaped by the social environment, as well as the stories, tales and literature we hear and read from an early age, along with our material environment, the images and representations we see throughout our lives.

In the context of this virtual exhibition, ’mother' is to be understood broadly, referring to any carer who is important to the child, regardless of their gender or biological relationship.

Presenting children with toys, the figural decoration on the facade of the Art Nouveau building indicates its function. The girl in this drawing holds a doll in swaddling clothes, with a doll on either side reflecting the formal vocabulary of the period; the design for another part of the facade features little boys with building blocks, tin soldiers and a rocking horse. The drawing and the genre of the toy store are representative of such notions of children and their material environment as were held in the last third of the 19th century and the early 20th century. 

Said arts writer Pál Nádai about the significance of play in shaping notions of roles and mental representation:

‘I give the little girl a doll, the boy a soldier... They begin to play with it. Their imagination dresses them in fine clothes; fills their limbs with flesh, blood, and muscles, breathes a soul into them. They also give it a name, put the dead matter to sleep or take it for a walk. … [The child] can not only feel happy or sorry for his dolls or soldiers, but will also talk to them, feed them and put them to sleep, with a seriousness that shows their future vocation.’

Signed by Jenő Farkasházy Fischer and produced at the Herend Porcelain Factory, this lithophane plate shows a small girl whose posture and eye contact with the doll she holds gently suggest emotional involvement, an imaginary relationship. She holds the doll close to her heart, the way mothers usually hold their babies. The symbolic play with the doll, the time spent together, contribute to the development of the mental representation of the mother–child relationship, which begins in childhood.

Images of Mary and Mary with the child Jesus are important examples of the depiction of mothers (motherhood) and the mother–child relationship. They are indeed the most typical representations in Christian culture, and their character was always determined by the theology and teaching of a given period, which has led to heterogeneity in the imagery of Mary, the child, and their duo.

Probably out of a desire to communicate the dual (divine and human) nature of Christ to lay audiences, special iconographic types of Mary the mother also emerged, which foreground the human quality: she is sometimes shown as pregnant or as breastfeeding her child.

Both the base and the cup feature a pregnant Mary, who rests her hands on her abdomen, with the Saviour visible in her womb as a naked infant surrounded by a mandorla. The image slightly modifies a 13th- or 14th-century statue of Mary in the Bogenberg Marienkirche.
Drawing probably on Byzantine models, Western Christianity produced several types of representations of the pregnant Mary: including images with a pronouncedly curved belly, with Jesus in her womb, being on her own, or in the company of Elizabeth.

The best-known examples are Hera in antique culture, whose milk formed the Milky Way, the Egyptian Isis suckling Horus, and in Eastern and Western Christianity, Mary breastfeeding the child Jesus. Mother’s milk is also thematized outside the mother–child relationship, as in the legend of St Bernard. 
Very often, breast milk and lactation were thought to have life-sustaining, healing powers, in line with modern scientific knowledge, which is why the miraculous pictures of Mary and the breastfeeding Madonna were so popular during epidemics.

With an intimate depiction of Mary and Jesus, this historicizing pendant offers a modern take on a type of painting that appeared in Western art in the Middle Ages; it was based on the ‘Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple’ scene in the Gospel of Luke, and was modelled on the Byzantine Eleousa (Virgin of Tenderness).

The new role brings about a change in the woman’s social environment, a reintegration of her personality and self-definition. This process was supported by the marriage chest and its decoration, which usually included scenes from mythology and legends to give guidance on what the given age considered the perfect wife and mother.

The Museum of Applied Arts has a large collection of gingerbread moulds, including several that produce babies in swaddling clothes, made in the 18th and 19th centuries. The baby, tightly wrapped in richly decorated textile, illustrates the custom of swaddling, which was widespread throughout the world until the 18th century, and then fell out of use in the Western world. 

Some of the white porcelain plates that make up the work bear the artist’s private photographs—some of which are identical—while the others show impressions made by crumpled children’s clothes.

This wall sculpture from the ceramics collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, with a hand placed on a curved belly, evokes the relationship with the unborn child. A recent discovery attributes ‘competence’ to the fetus, which can respond to various stimuli (acoustic, haptic), and can thus establish a connection with its environment, in particular the mother carrying it in her body.

The casting-based work interlocks positive and negative spaces, and offers a visual representation of ambivalent and negative connotations related to pregnancy, the anxiety that sometimes accompanies the physical and psychological changes during those months, the interwovenness of life and death.

In Hungary, obstetrics had been taught at the university level—in connection with surgery—since the late 18th century, at the university founded by Péter Pázmány, but faculties of medicine and clinics of obstetrics and gynaecology, which served training and patient care, were not established in other cities of the country until the early 20th century. In line with the contemporary requirements of clinical practice, the planning of the new establishments followed the pavilion principle.

The increase in the number of maternity clinics contributed significantly to the reduction in maternal and infant mortality—phenomena that are still among the most anxiety-inducing issues in the third trimester of pregnancy.