Breastfeeding rates in Britain remain depressingly low: despite initiative after initiative, only one in five babies is still being exclusively breastfed at six weeks. So thank goodness we start 2012 with one of the finest posters ever produced for the pro-breastfeeding movement – a reproduction of the Madonna Litta, which art lovers are currently queuing up to see at the National Gallery where it's part of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition.
The Madonna Litta is 500 years old, but from the standpoint of breastfeeding in 21st-century Britain, she's way ahead of her time. In a society still trying to work out how to encourage more mothers to make the healthiest choices for their baby, this touching portrait of a young mother and her child makes every point you want to make about why breastfeeding is such a good idea.
In the painting, Mary looks serene and happy, and baby Jesus looks healthy and replete. She is gazing down at her boy; he is looking towards us, his eyelids heavy with sleep now he has had his fill of her milk. Mary's outfit features a detail that was perhaps common in breastfeeding-friendly Renaissance Florence, but which is less often seen now – an opening has been made in the material of her top to provide easy access to her breasts when her baby needs to feed. The painting is almost an advert for such a practical solution to the age-old problem of how to produce a boob quickly when your child is shrieking for a feed; and to make the point about how useful it is, the Christ-child in Leonardo's painting is grasping his mother's breast with his chubby, well-fed right hand.
The art historians who eulogise this painting sometimes don't mention what to me is its finest point of all: that is, how comfortable a society can be with the idea of breastfeeding. Leonardo thought it entirely natural and unremarkable that a mum would be proud to be seen breastfeeding her not-even-all-that-tiny child.
How tragically different the UK of today, where the latest advance in breastfeeding aids is, not a lovely, easy-access top like the one Leonardo's Mary is modelling, but a hideous, hide-all, cape-like item that retails at around £20 and offers you a "stylish and discreet" way to breastfeed. "The cover-up allows a bit more privacy," says the sell on one website proffering the item. Accompanying images show the capes in use on real-life mothers – and how unlike Leonardo's Madonna they are. Instead of the robust, red-haired toddler in the painting we see, in fact, no baby at all (the child is totally obscured by the cover-up); and unlike Leonardo's Mary, who is looking adoringly at her bouncing babe, these mums can't even see theirs because they're hidden from even their view by that oh-so-discreet cape.
I'm sorry to say I've seen an increasing number of these depressing items in use over the last few weeks, and it seems like a backward step as far as breastfeeding is concerned. Leonardo's Madonna had it right – and so does her breast-grasping baby. Before we can expect our breastfeeding rates to go up, we have to start being comfortable with the concept – comfortable in a way that was clearly second-nature in 15th-century Florence, but which is almost entirely lost today. Let's hope some of the hoards of people flocking to the Leonardo show realise that the Madonna Litta isn't just a beacon in Renaissance art; it's also a beacon in the art of breastfeeding.
