Madonna
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Madonna. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an Italian word signifying my lady or madam. The Madonna and Child--Mary and the Christ Child--is the most celebrated subject in art. The painters of different nationalities and schools have vied with each other in depicting the Mother and Child. Strangly enough, the Hebrew woman and child are entirely wanting. Each artist seems to have aimed to produce the ideal mother and the ideal child of his own nationality. Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Russian madonnas fill the museums of painting, but the dark Hebrew beauty and her black-eyed child are conspicuously wanting. The Century Dictionary names no less than forty-three madonnas worthy of mention, including masterpieces by Raphael, Murillo, Titian, Durer, Holbein, and Leonardo da Vinci . Objects shown in the various paintings have given rise to special names, as Madonna of the Rabbit, the Madonna of the Chair, the Madonna of Pity, the Madonna of the Thistle Finch, the Madonna of the Canopy, the Madonna of the Rosary, the Madonna of the Rose, the Madonna of the Napkin, the Madonna of the Cherries, and the Madonna of the Grapes. Of all the madonnas, the most noted is the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, shown in the museum at Dresden. See Raphael ; Sistine Madonna ; Holbein ; Murillo
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a word originally used in Italy, like madame in France, as a title of honor and dignity, but now exclusively applied to the Virgin Mary, as in other languages she is called "Our Lady." It is also applied to a number of celebrated pictures, in which the Virgin forms the sole or principal object, as the Madonnas of Raphael.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
As art history, the accounts still hold: the Madonna and Child remains among the most painted subjects in Western art, and Raphael's Sistine Madonna hangs in Dresden as Aiton's said in 1910 — though it spent the end of the Second World War in a tunnel, was carried off to Moscow by Soviet forces in 1945, and only returned to the Gemäldegalerie in 1955. Aiton's complaint that "the dark Hebrew beauty and her black-eyed child are conspicuously wanting" has since become a mainstream point in scholarship and in church art, with widespread modern depictions of a Middle Eastern Mary and Jesus. The largest change is in the word itself: since the 1980s and the career of Madonna Ciccone, whose album Like a Virgin appeared in 1984, an English speaker who hears "Madonna" is more likely to think of a pop singer than of Raphael or the Virgin.
Written for this edition, 2026.