**1. Introduction**

The Ecumenical Councils of Nicaea (325) and Ephesus (431) set up the fundamental dogma of the Virgin Mary's divine motherhood. Consequently, she quickly began receiving repeated and profound attention from many Church Fathers and medieval theologians, thus configuring a solid and concordant Mariological tradition for more than a millennium. In turn, this doctrinal tradition was translated into two intrinsically related and complementary manifestations: on the one hand, the Fathers and theologians' statements about Mary served as eidetic inspiration and doctrinal foundation for numerous medieval hymnographers, who composed countless antiphons, canticles, and liturgical hymns, which were recited or sung in public religious ceremonies or private prayers; secondly, the Mariological tradition established by the Fathers and theologians also promoted a widespread devotion to the Virgin Mary according to various invocations and titles, which quickly spread to all corners of the Christian sphere.

In the current article, based on the analysis of texts and artistic images referring to Mary's savior-like mediation in favor of humankind, we will focus our research on three points: first, in the thematic field, we will analyze the textual and iconic data referring exclusively to the designation of Mary as the "gate of Heaven", "door of Paradise", or the equivalent concepts of Mary as "mediator", "intercessor", "protector", or other similar titles; second, in the textual field, we will restrict to the medieval liturgical hymns that allude to the subject under study, since we have destined another academic article to analyze the writings of Church Fathers and medieval theologians on the topic; thirdly, in the iconic field, we will center the study on medieval and Renaissance pictorial and sculptural representations that make Mary visible in one way or another as the gate of Heaven, or as a mediator and intercessor of humanity before God.

We believe it is necessary to highlight the academic novelty of our article in the sense that, based on considerable expertise in medieval Mariology, we are not aware of any study that has addressed the issue of the saving mediation of the Virgin Mary as gate of Heaven

**Citation:** Salvador-González, José María. 2023. *Paradisi porta*—An Iconographic Analysis of Mary as a Humanity's Mediator in the Light of Medieval Liturgical Hymns. *Religions* 14: 284. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel14020284

Academic Editors: Fátima Matos Silva, Isabel Borges, Helena Albuquerque and Marina Montesano

Received: 5 January 2023 Revised: 16 January 2023 Accepted: 16 February 2023 Published: 20 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

from the perspective of medieval liturgical hymns. As if that were not enough, as far as we know, there is no study that has linked these hymns with some medieval paintings and sculptures that illustrate Mary as the *porta Paradisi* symbol, as we do in this article.
