PROLOGUE
Parallel Evolution: Representation
of Breastfeeding in the Arts and Sciences
Throughout humans' history as mammals, there have always been cases in which a mother could not breastfeed her newborn. Apart from the unavoidable consequences of the death of the mother or infant, there exist other cases which were perhaps avoidable, but came to be defined (in interaction with culture) as "failure of lactation." Since ancient times, the mysterious nature of success or failure in lactation has led to cultural and scientific interest. The cultural interpretation of the phenomena of breastfeeding has become part of society's traditional medical beliefs and practices as well as its art.
The act of breastfeeding is perhaps the part of the human life cycle most represented by artists and artisans of all types, across all cultures. As a subject, breastfeeding is a meditation on the theme of love, as warfare is a meditation on the theme of death. Breastfeeding serves as a physical representation of Natura, and embodied in the act itself is the connection of two powerful bodies or structures: mother-infant and culture-biology. It is an innocent yet powerful symbol of the constant interactions of culture and biology.
African legends, Indian fables, Chinese proverbs, Greek mythologies, and Amazonian cosmovisiones tell the origins of their respective peoples, nature, religion, culture, and overall concept of the universe. Woven among these narratives, a mother's breastmilk is presented as the elemental body fluid, the continuator of life, creator of culture, and fertilizer of the universe.
Here I will briefly refer to certain archaeologies, sculptures, and paintings that reflect interactions of breastfeeding and culture. During my visit to Ecuador in 2018 and the local museums in Esmeraldas and Quito, I was amazed to see archeological pieces that depict women's fertility, maternity, and lactation in many forms, from similar cultures but different time periods. In the city of Esmeraldas, for example, at the Museo y Centro Cultural Esmeraldas, one can observe a ceramic piece of a breastfeeding mother holding her infant in one arm, while her free hand squeezes her other breast (La Tolita ~ 600 BC-400 AD). At the Museo Nacional del Ecuador (MuNa) in Quito, among various pieces representing womanhood, you can see a beautiful ceramic piece of a woman with a child in her lap (~35cm high). The original colors have faded between a homogeneous pale brown and a dark solid brown (see Photo 1). The museum label, translated from the Spanish, describes the scene: "mother with a child in offering attitude (Chorrera Culture 1000-300 BC)."
Photo 1
In the small town of Valdivia (which bears the same name as one of the oldest cultures that inhabited this region of South America), there is a kiosk that sells archaeological replicas of past cultures, including a figure very similar to the one I saw at the museum. I bought a colorful, hollow ceramic, about 35 centimeters tall and belonging to the Chorrera culture, representing a mother with an infant resting on the right side of her lap.
As we can see from the next picture, the woman has an elongated cranial modification, a feature which might indicate an important part of her identity and/or suggest her social status (Stothert and Cevallos 2007). The polished surface of what seems to be a helmet draws the viewer's attention to the tattoos on her face and those covering her shoulders, breasts, and pelvic region. They are well illustrated with geometric patterns characterized by incised lines and dots. The piece is an intense red and yellowish brown, parts of her calf and feet a smoked black-colors commonly used by Chorrera artisans, according to Stothert and Cevallos, who tell us the tattoos served as protection from evil spirits. I believe they were also powerful symbols of motherhood, fertility, and femininity. The rigidity of the child, wrapped in a cloth cradleboard in the ancient technique of swaddling, strikes me. The infant is dormie, or it is dead. I cannot tell from the figure. Notice the protuberant and horizontal linear eyes of the mother and infant; their faces, to me, reveal neither happiness nor sadness.
Photo 2
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, one can find a small but vibrant Tiffany-colored faience (17 cm. high) from Egypt (332-30 BC) depicting a smiling Isis. The goddess is shown with "full" breasts, breastfeeding an infant Horus, well-fed and likewise smiling. According to the museum's description, the image was a symbol of rebirth. The figure doubles as a symbol and a message of the continuation of its people and, therefore, their culture.
Due to its significance in Christianity, European painters produced many works on the theme of breastfeeding, e.g., the multiple and diverse "Madonnas and Child" of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, El Greco, and many others. Artwork in Europe and elsewhere were also inspired by popular myths; an astounding number of paintings and sculptures, for example, depict the twin brothers Romulus and Remus nursed by a she-wolf. According to the legend (ca. 750 BC), the twins were abandoned in a cave called the Lupercal (in today's Italy) by their mother to save them from being killed. They were raised by wolves in the wild until a peasant rescued them, bringing the twins to his wife to be suckled. Later in life, according to the myth, Romulus killed Remus and went on to found the city of Rome. Such is the irony of the twins' survival, for one to ultimately die by the hand of his own wolf-brother (this could be what the expression "bad-milk" means in many cultures). Or consider The Origin of the Milky Way by Peter Paul Rubens (1637). It portrays a well-nourished white woman, the goddess Hera, holding a well-fed child, Heracles, and spilling her breastmilk into the sky as she tries to nurse him. Mighty Zeus, seen in the background of the painting, contemplates the act. According to Greek mythology, the god Zeus conceived Heracles with a mortal woman named Alcmene. The painting thus represents a wet-nurse case in reverse: a goddess breastfeeding a mortal, or a superordinate woman breastfeeding a child of subordinate nature. It is a resonating representation of equality through breastmilk, the love of a goddess for humans and, even more, the powers of mother's milk as creator of "our" universe and maintainer of human life within it.
In Cimon and Pero (also called Roman Charity), another painting by Rubens (1612), a young woman, Cimon, breastfeeds an old man, Pero, who is her father, in the ultimate act of piety. We can see in the painting that Pero is in jail, and, according to the story, he has been condemned to starvation in ancient Rome. The image of the breastfeeding woman able to nourish a disordered society is indeed timeless and symbolically evocative across the centuries. Recall that in the final scene of the great 20th-century American novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a young woman who has lost her baby breastfeeds a starving man. One more 17th-century example is La Mujer Barbuda by Jusepe de Rivera (1631), in which a bearded woman (who looks like an old man) is breastfeeding her child. The inscription on the painting says: "Look, a great miracle of nature..." A case of hirsutism, a hormonal disorder causing excessive hair growth in women, that in the artist's eye made the woman look like a man-one of the apparent biological "contradictions" in nature. In the end, this painting is a powerful representation of humanity that, among other things, exposes the observer to the stereotypes we have, including the social construction of gender and its morphology.
Furthermore, exposing nature itself and the innocent oxygen of resilience are several artistic representations of Europe's plague. In the painting The Plague of Ashdod (Louvre, Paris), by the painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), one can perceive the anxiety in their faces and panic and chaos in the population. Bodies are lying in the square, people covering their noses and mouths with their hands, the rats running in disarray and forehead in the picture, we see the faded dead-mother, with two children at her sides, one lifeless and the other trying to suck a breast. Even more dramatic is the etching by the engraver Robert Pollard (1755-1838), entitled "The great plague in London, 1665" (Wellcome Library). In the image's background, the observer could see bodies on a horse-cart and in the foreground, four women, dead or dying, and an infant dragging his small body to reach the dead mother's breast. It seems to be the representation of life itself confronting death.
For an example of breastfeeing in Eastern art, we can look to the work of the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806). In his paintings, you can see detailed portrayals of what seems to be an average day in the life of a Japanese mother and child enjoying each other's company, reflective and without stress, representing that "Zen" stage of natural breastfeeding, which scholars mention as one of its effects. You can sometimes see a playful infant sucking one breast while playing with the other breast's nipple (a reflex?), or an apparently distracted mother looking through the...
