Who is The Madonna from The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel and what is their importance?

"Madonna" is one of the many names used to refer to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. The term is often used to describe and/or define visual images of the woman that Roman Catholics call The Blessed Virgin, images which often also contain images of the infant Christ. The story of the Madonna is, in short, this - the young, spiritually pure Mary is visited by a messenger from God, the angel Gabriel, and told that she is to conceive and bear God's child. She accepts what is to happen to her humbly, marries her betrothed (an older man named Joseph), and has the child under difficult circumstances (i.e., in a stable). While the child is still an infant, she and her husband have to take him into exile in order to evade the wrath of a threatened king who heard that the child was himself to be a powerful king and wanted to kill him. Images of any one of these moments, and additional imagined ones, were the subject of works of religious art for centuries, many of which have been given such names as "The Raphael Madonna" or "Madonna and Child". As a symbol, the Madonna represents trust, faith, hope, courage, grace, and unconditional maternal love. All these aspects of her, and more, are incorporated into the various paintings referred to in the novel, and all these are, in one way or another, incorporated into the life and experience of Marina, its central character.