The "Ave Bernarde!"

One of the famous Marian moments in Saint Bernard’s hagiography is the ave-dialogue, wherein the Blessed Virgin answers Bernards Ave Maria with the salutation Ave Bernarde! The scene, shown here in Joseph Sebastian Klauber’s Pinacotheca Mariana (1760), is important for several reasons: Since Bernard was opposed to the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, showing him with a similar Marian figure (on a pillar, but without the half-moon at her feet or stars around her head) suggests that he loves Mary none the less for it. In terms of the words in the scene shooting back and forth between Mary and the famous abbot, it is a “cleaned up” version of the lactatio, another famous scene in Bernardine iconography. The lactatio shows Mary squirting her mother’s milk into Bernard’s mouth, in a line of projection very much comparable to the words in Klauber’s image. The lactatio was one of the most popular scenes from Bernard’s life in the Middle Ages, but lost its appeal in the modern era.