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The Domestication of Marian Iconography: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Subversion in Max Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses
Golubev, Sofya
Golubev, Sofya
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Abstract
This thesis examines Max Ernst’s La Vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus devant trois témoins (1926) as a visual structure in which authority, repression, visibility, and sacred form are reconfigured under the conditions of modernity. Rather than approaching the painting as an isolated act of anti-clerical provocation, the study situates it at the intersection of Surrealist theory, interwar cultural trauma, and the persistence of religious power after the collapse of metaphysical belief. The Virgin’s authority, the Child’s exposure, and the presence of the witnesses are treated not as symbolic inversions alone, but as a system in which discipline, spectatorship, and psychic inscription converge. The analysis unfolds through a layered methodological framework drawing on Freud’s theories of repression, taboo, and the uncanny; Lacan’s concept of the gaze; Foucault’s model of surveillance and docile bodies; Bataille’s economy of transgression and continuity; Artaud’s conception of metaphysical theatre; and Nietzsche’s critique of moral value and asceticism. These perspectives do not function as external interpretations imposed upon the image, but as diagnostic tools through which the painting’s internal logic of power, visibility, and affect becomes legible. Scholarship has largely framed the work through iconographic inversion; this thesis argues that the painting operates as a site where the sacred is neither destroyed nor preserved, but structurally displaced. Sanctity is reorganized through bodily vulnerability, authority through maternal discipline, and belief through the optics of exposure rather than transcendence. The three witnesses establish a regime of looking that implicates the viewer within the scene’s economy of control, transforming spectatorship into participation. By reading the painting simultaneously as historical artifact, psychic construction, and philosophical problem, this study proposes that Ernst’s work does not 2 merely negate religious form but reveals the modern mechanisms through which power continues to operate after theology has lost its ground.
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Thesis (B.A. in Art History, Minor in Philosophy)--John Cabot University, Fall 2025.
Date
2025
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Christian art and symbolism
Citation
Golubev, Sofya. "The Domestication of Marian Iconography: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Subversion in Max Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2025.