The Madonna della Misericordia is the name of a recurring Christian iconography in art, linked to the protection of Mary.

The Virgin is depicted standing, in large dimensions, while she spreads her cloak to welcome the kneeling faithful below her. It is a legacy of the medieval era, known as the "protection of the mantle", which the noblewomen in high places could grant to the persecuted and in need of help. This consisted precisely in giving them symbolic shelter under one's cloak, considered inviolable.

The iconography was particularly successful among the medieval and Renaissance brotherhoods, including above all the brotherhoods of the Misericordia. Even after the Counter-Reformation the subject continued to enjoy a large following, due to its evident devotional connotations.

With the spread of this iconographic typology, the whole of humanity ended up finding shelter under the mantle of the Virgin: men and women, children, members of religious brotherhoods or congregations of trades, bishops and popes, kings and emperors. The Madonna, represented in this way as the protector of mankind from the evils of the world, was also called Our Lady of Help, of Consolation, Notre-Dame de Consolation in France, Schutzmantelmadonna ("Madonna of the protective mantle") in Germany, Madonna of the recommended in Sardinia, etc.

Among the historical origins of this figurative model we must remember the medieval theologian and German writer Cesario di Heisterbach, who, in the Dialogus Miraculorum, composed between 1220 and 1230, reports the vision of a Cistercian friar, an order to which he himself belonged, who, kidnapped in ecstasy and taken to Heaven, had had the opportunity to see hidden under the folds of the Virgin's large cloak the monks of Citeaux, very dear to her. This view was soon adopted by other orders, the Dominicans, the Carmelites and even the Jesuits.