Virgin Mary exhibition is flawed by exclusion of modern works

Picturing Mary" is the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in years, and given its subject - images of the Virgin Mary - it is likely to be one of its most popular as well. It opened in Washington, DC, early this month in the Christmas season, when the subject of Mary is particularly resonant, and it includes more than 60 works, some of them by the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance and baroque eras, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dürer. If this show doesn't fill the museum's galleries with throngs of visitors, nothing will.

The subject is vast, and doing it justice in one exhibition is impossible. One might organise such a show based on the archetypal narrative moments in Mary's life - the Annunciation, the Pieta, the Assumption - that have inspired artists for centuries. Indeed, one might organise an exhibition around any single one of those archetypes, and still the amount of material would be overwhelmingly huge.

Guest curator Monsignor Timothy Verdon, who is director of the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, has chosen to focus the show into chapters exploring different aspects of Mary's identity and her relationship to Christianity. One section focuses on Mary as mother and woman, another on her presentiments of grief and the loss of her child, another on "Mary as Idea", and another is devoted to the use and appropriation of Mary in religious practice.

The exhibition also devotes substantial attention to images of Mary made by female artists, so there are works by well-known figures, such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, and lesser names, including several large works by mid-17th-century painter Orsola Maddalena Caccia.