**3. An Iconographic Analysis of Some Artworks Alluding to the Virgin Mary's Savior Mediation**

The doctrinal thesis of the Virgin Mary's mediating, intercessory, and savior power, expressed in the metaphor "gate of Heaven or door of Paradise", stands out in various forms or iconographic modalities in painting and sculpture. We will highlight here the three modalities that seem to be the most representative, namely, the intercession of Mary at the Last Judgment, the figure of the Virgin with the Child at some entrance of the temple, and thirdly, the Virgin framed by a door or opening in various Marian scenes, especially the Annunciation.

We believe that these three iconographic modalities are the ones that most strongly and clearly illustrate the Virgin Mary as the gate of Heaven or the door of Paradise (*ianua Coeli, porta Paradisi*, scilicet) as the decisive mediator in humanity's eternal salvation. The first modality, in which the Virgin appears in the scene of the Last Judgment pleading before her divine Son, the Supreme Judge, for clemency in favor of those who are being judged, is very clear and significant: in the Last Judgment, the salvation or eternal damnation of human beings is settled once and for all, and at this decisive moment the believer hopes to have the saving mediation of universal Judge's mother. The second iconographic modality, in which Mary appears at the entrance to the temple—whether, as we will see later, with her Child in her arms on the mullion of some portal, or on its tympanum, through the scene of the Coronation or that of the Last Judgment—is no less evident: by being located at the entrance of the Christian temple in a prominent place (in the mullion between two doors, and/or in the tympanum that crowns it), Mary exhibits herself in this way once again, due to her condition as mother of the founder of Christianity—the new religion and Church guaranteeing salvation—as the privileged mediator capable of facilitating the entrance to Heaven, symbolized by the physical temple at whose entrance the figure of Mary as *porta Paradisi* stands out. The third iconographic modality, although more subtly suggested, is also explainable: since the human conception/incarnation of God the Son in the virgin womb of Mary takes place just in the event of the Annunciation, it is clear that framing/identifying the Virgin with a door/arch/opening in a pictorial scene of the Annunciation allows us to highlight that, as the mother of the Redeemer/Savior, the Virgin plays a fundamental role in the eternal redemption/salvation of human beings, that is to say, as the gate of Heaven.

On the other hand, we selected here a set of sculptural and pictorial artworks without any pretense of alleged exact "science", as if it were a mathematical equation or a chemical formula: our subjective "humanistic" selection is only a representative sample within a much broader and more complex universe, in which any other researcher can select as many equally representative samples as possible. We chose those paintings and sculptures because they seem to us very important to the subject studied. Additionally, the fact that these artworks are different in type, in dating, and in subject matter, certifies that the various countries and regions of Christian Europe in those medieval centuries agreed on the same or similar experiences, beliefs, and doctrinal ideas, just illustrated by these artworks.

Let us now see some examples of these three iconographic variants.
