A meme, in Richard Dawkins's original definition, is a unit of culture that copies itself from mind to mind the way a gene copies itself from body to body. He coined the word in 1976 from the Greek mimeme, something imitated, long before the internet handed it back to us as a joke with a caption. The title plays on Mater Dei, Mother of God.

This is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the image that hangs in kitchens and bedrooms across Latin America, her heart offered openly and her hand raised in blessing. Simeon prophesied that a sword would pierce her soul, and painters have shown that sword through her heart ever since. Here the heart is pixelated and the sword is an X, the new name of a platform that used to be called something else. It is also the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christ's name, a Christian monogram since the time of Constantine, now a logo. Her halo is a field of app icons in gold, the small squares we touch a hundred times a day. We still call them icons, from the Greek eikon, image.

Mater Meme is inspired by older faces. The wide eyes and frontal gaze come from the Fayum portraits, painted on wooden panels in Roman Egypt and laid over the faces of the dead, and from the Byzantine icons that grew out of them. That tradition traveled through Crete into Spain, most famously with El Greco, who began as an icon painter, and from Spain into the colonial workshops of the Americas. She is the mother of images that reproduce themselves. Every generation gets the Madonna it deserves.