I thought I didn’t care about Renaissance art. Then life happened to me – I saw the power of it | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

tThis is a painting I often think of. this Madonna del PartoA masterpiece drawn by Piero Della Francesca around 1460 is located in a dedicated museum in Montqui, Tuscan town. It depicts a pregnant Virgin Mary flanked by two angels. For local women, the painting is considered a protector of fertility and the life of pregnant women during birth. During World War II, local women surrounded two men, who mistakenly thought the Nazis were going to steal it. In 1954, they protested against their proposed exhibition in Florence. I remember when students were studying, these women were hanging out in the streets to stop them from leaving.

Yesterday, I thought of those women again, as I walked around the Jenny Saville exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, tracking the influence of the Renaissance on her work. Saville’s conversation with the outstanding painter began when she was young, when an art historian brought her to Venice. It lasted throughout her career, most notably her Maternity pictureswhich shows that she was under the severe influence of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, which shows that her baby or two babies. The ghost of their Madonnas seems to linger in the sketch lines of Saville’s mother’s figure. One of her most famous works, stunning, sculptures, charcoal and pastels pietàiis the result of her study of Michelangelo’s “Seeds”.

I was worried that I would lose you because of my annoyance, so I went back to the protesting women in Montkey. In my 20s, I was amazed that anyone could care so much about Renaissance painting that they lay down the street like these women. This art makes me feel cold and my personal lack of religion is undoubtedly a factor. I see it as all the old-looking baby Jesus, people pointing and kneeling. Academically, I understand its importance – the dawn of perspective! I studied and analyzed Titians and Michelangelos as needed, and even conducted Socrates oral exams on Leonardo’s works in Italian. However, where I have choices, I always move towards abstraction and contemporary. None of this is what I said, like Rothko or Joan Mitchell.

I know the problem is me: I just didn’t get it. That strange alchemy, some of which resonate with the artwork avoided me. More than a decade later, in my mother’s painting room in Saville, I couldn’t seem to “understand” what some paintings have done to my religious growth, but more about my lack of life experience. When I was 23, a man tried to kill me, and the trauma seemed to be partially reflected in the baroque flavor (conceit, yes, but we all use art, most often music, most often my death metal. I dragged my then boyfriend to a church in Rome to see Caravaggis. Standing in front of Artemisia in Gentileschi Judith killed Holofnes In Uffizi, she felt her anger.

When I was young, nothing was more susceptible than feeling serious, so like many in my 20s, I hid the green behind the painful cynicism of the affected world. But life happens in life. Important, sometimes terrible things, I think older things also make people deeply caring and open, which is not that awkward at all. As a young person, the emotional complexity of certain experiences is closed, not only death, but also related to pregnancy or maternity. I don’t want to go there.

Then, about the time I started thinking about having a baby, I started reading angel paintings. Angel Gabriel told the young Virgin Mary that the moment she told the young Virgin Mary that she would have a child – a lack of faith in the birth of a virgin, an artistic distillation of this feeling that was about to change how much life would change – almost overnight for me. Once I found out that I was pregnant, there were only more.

When I was a kid, I Fra Angelico’s Remuneration From my mother’s book, completely ignore Mary. When a woman standing in front of Florence, all I can pay attention to is the expression on her face. It would help to see things in person, but I doubt, hormones.

This summer, a good friend discovered she was pregnant – it happened so quickly that she was as shocked as I did. I sent her a picture of the painting, writing poetically: “She looks like she is going to VOM”. Maybe I still have some ability to resist seriousness, but I won’t go back to my young, cynical self. I would rather be the new postpartum person who cried at Raphael Madonna, though it was painful.

I didn’t cry at the Saville show, but I was in front of Aleppo, before her for the Syrian children’s Peter (Aleppo), which also seemed to contain all the sorrow and pain of the mother of Gazan children who were murdered by Israel. I know that women in Montkey should protect not only their masterpieces, but their babies. Being willing to be moved by art also means being willing to be moved by the pain of others, and even putting yourself in your own danger. In other words, lying on the street.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a guardian columnist. Her book Nude – a novel about art, body and female sexual behavior – will be published in 2026.