The designers of Christmas cards and chocolate boxes owe precious little to Michelangelo. Whereas most of his Italian predecessors and contemporaries churned out a steady supply of charming images of the Madonna and Child, Michelangelo rarely tackled the subject, and when he did, made it awesome and traumatic rather than intimate and lyrical.  Take what is usually regarded as his earliest surviving work, The Madonna of the Stairs (c1492), made when he was still a teenager attached to the household of Lorenzo de' Medici. This small but complex marble relief is astonishingly original. The Virgin is shown full-length in profile, seated on a large stone cube. A muscular Christ child suckles at her breast, his back towards us. The left side of the relief is filled by a steep stone stairway, at the top of which a gesticulating scrum of well-built putti struggle to unfurl what could be a sheet, banner or garland. Mary is so massive and towering, with outsized hands and feet, that she barely fits into the remaining space: the top of her halo is shaved off by the raised edge of the relief.  Paradoxically, the intimate act of breastfeeding has become an excuse for a withdrawal rather than an increase of maternal affection. The Madonna keeps eyes front, and seems barely aware of her son. He may be asleep, since his right arm hangs loose, awkwardly twisted behind his back - elements that seem to foretell his own death and entombment. Michelangelo's Madonnas have a uniquely distant feel; they appear lost in thought and reluctant to revel in their son's childhood.  Leonardo confronted the issue of the Virgin Mary's conduct in relation to her child in a small cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne, made in Florence in 1501, with very different results. In Leonardo's art, it is inconceivable that a mother could hold herself back with her child, and so here it is St Anne, the Virgin's mother, who is the cool pragmatist who keeps the holy show on the road. As a contemporary observer explained, the Christ child is shown wriggling free from the arms of the Virgin to seize a lamb, an animal that signifies his Passion and Crucifixion. Leonardo's Virgin tries to prevent him embracing it, but St Anne, "rising slightly from her seat, seems as if she would hold back her daughter, so that she would not separate the Child from the lamb, which perhaps signifies that the Church did not wish to prevent the passion of Christ".  After his return to Florence from Rome in 1501, Michelangelo became a keen student of Leonardo's work, and he must have looked very closely at this image, which is now lost but known from painted studio copies. Leonardo's stern St Anne seems to have had a direct influence on the hieratic severity of Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna (1504-06), a marble sculpture probably conceived in the second half of 1501, though not executed until a few years later. Like St Anne, Michelangelo's Madonna is seated bolt upright, and she shares the same instrumental outlook as she does not attempt to restrain the Christ child. Rather, she is helping him to climb down from her rocky seat so that he can go out into the world. Christ's sharp downward motion prophesies the moment of his burial, as though he were "born astride the grave".  In the 1490s and early 1500s, on the eve of the Reformation, there was heated debate concerning the role and representation of the Virgin Mary. The charismatic Dominican preacher Savonarola complained that Florentine artists made her so glamorous that she resembled a prostitute, and he also insisted they should not show her distraught during Christ's Passion. In 1506, when Pope Julius II was considering a new feast to celebrate Mary's sufferings, he was dissuaded by the argument that Mary was ruled by reason and would not have swooned with grief at the foot of the Cross. However, Michelangelo's contemporaries were principally concerned with the Virgin's conduct at the time of Christ's death, rather than during his infancy. In art, the mother-infant bond was sacrosanct.  Michelangelo seems to have regarded maternal absenteeism and "tough love" as positive insofar as they turned boys into men, and men into heroes. In his visual universe, the absence of an intimate and enveloping domestic realm means there is nowhere for boys and men to hide - hence the heroism and pathos of their nakedness. It is not just in a psychological sense that the development of Michelangelo's males is accelerated; they are physically precocious, too. Every Michelangelo Christ child is a boy Hercules, and when the artist came to carve the boy David, he created a virile giant.  Michelangelo had a similarly unsentimental view of his own childhood. He used to boast that as a baby he had been sent to a wet nurse whose husband and father were both stonemasons, joking that he "sucked in" with his nurse's milk the chisels and hammer with which he carved his figures. This fanciful physiological explanation for his choice of vocation suggests a pride in the perceived uncouthness of his upbringing, and his belief in the heroism of the stone-carver's life.  The heroism of the mother-infant relationship is nowhere more startlingly expressed than in the Doni Tondo (c1504-06). This circular panel painting depicting the Holy Family is one of Michelangelo's most impressive yet puzzling creations. The Virgin Mary sits on the ground in a field, with a closed book on her lap, yet she has to twist her powerful upper body right round and back in order to receive the Christ child from over her shoulder. He is being passed to her by Joseph, who squats behind her like an elderly samurai. It is the only time in Michelangelo's work when the Madonna tries to make eye contact with her child, yet this attempt is so strained and precarious that we see the whites of her eyes. The background scene, with its athletic group of male nudes leaning louchely against a continuous band of jagged rock, and the infant John the Baptist on the far right peering up at Christ from behind a stone parapet, contributes to the tense intricacy of the image. The whole scene is bathed in glaring, almost shadowless light.  At first sight, the mise-en-scène looks as contrived as a politician holding a baby, and the tondo has been dismissed as "an exercise in gymnastics". Hostile critics have always used it to argue that Michelangelo was a formalist more concerned with inventing ingenious poses than in telling meaningful stories. They have overlooked the crucial fact that Michelangelo is making a breathtakingly simple visual parallel. The Virgin Mary closely matches depictions of the popular St Christopher, a giant who carried the poor and weak across a great river on his shoulder, and thus became the patron saint of travellers. One night he carried a child who grew heavier with each step. This turned out to be Christ, who informed him he had been carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Christopher's cult was particularly strong along rivers like the Arno that were prone to floods. Because of his strength, he was also the patron saint of athletes, and this helps explain the otherwise mysterious nudes in the background, while John the Baptist behind the parapet is a direct visual counterpart to the hermit who baptised Christopher.  In sacred terms, the incorporation of the Christopher motif underscores the heroism of the Holy Family in general, and of Mary in particular, by signalling the gravity of their status as earthly parents of Christ, and the strength needed to bear such responsibility. But in human terms, the awkwardness of her position, and the vertiginous height of Christ, confirms Michelangelo's resistance to the idea of intimacy and tenderness between the Madonna and Child. To this end, we should bear in mind that Christ and St Christopher were strangers before their brief encounter on the river, and that they never met again - in this life, at any rate. By this visual echo, Michelangelo reduces our sense of the amount of time that the Virgin Mary spent mothering Christ. By remaining slightly above and outside, this Christ child insists not just on his independence, but also on his eventual isolation on the cross.
Michelangelo was attacked for his unsentimental, contorted portrayals of the Virgin Mary. But his critics missed a crucial clue, says James Hall.