Her face is at once familiar and utterly strange, like something risen from the deep water of memory. Her smile is maternal -- soft, kind, infinitely loving -- but not your mother's smile. There's something unearthly in it, like the smiles Mary wears in pictures painted by Fra Lippo Lippi, or Raphael, or Botticelli.

Her arms circle in front of her, holding the figure that won her her name: The Okvik Madonna, carved from walrus ivory more than 2,000 years ago, eventually to end up buried in an abandoned Punuk Islands village, near St. Lawrence Island, 230 miles west of Nome. From the day she came back again to light, she has provoked fascination and inspired other works of art.

The Madonna, fresh from two years of painstaking conservation work, is now one of the centerpieces in the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The museum's $42 million face-lift and expansion have earned it national plaudits and boosted it to the front rank of regional museums. An artifact of the Okvik culture known for its striking human-figure carvings, the Madonna is displayed in the Rose Berry Gallery, which had its grand opening May 1. She is juxtaposed there with a Sydney Laurence painting, to give visitors a sense of the scope and sweep of Alaska art.

In a sense, UAF's Native artifacts collection was founded on the Madonna, which has been called priceless, the finest piece of carved Eskimo ivory in a public collection. She's been at the university since 1934, when Otto Geist, the legendary self-taught anthropologist who first began collecting for the university in 1926, dug her up.

"What makes me very happy (is to see) reactions to her on the faces of visitors," says Daniel Odess, curator of collections at UAF. "It really doesn't matter who it is; when they see her in the case, we get young children staring entranced and old ladies and people pulling each other over to look at her."

IVORY SNAPSHOT?

What accounts for such magnetism in an object barely nine inches long? In trying to answer, even case-hardened academics become poetic -- sometimes literally so. State writer Jerah Chadwick has written about her, as has no less a figure than University of Alaska President Mark Hamilton, whose poem on the Madonna appeared in the Anchorage literary journal Ice-Floe.

"I saw her; that was pretty much it," Hamilton says. "She's regal but not foreboding, and I think there's a hint of the Mona Lisa in her, which I referred to with the poem. She's iconic, there's no doubt about that, and I wrestled for a long time with the creature she's holding. I even contacted our folks in Arctic biology because I thought it might be a sea otter, but they told me (given where it was excavated) it couldn't be. So in my poem I made it into a seal."

Whether what she's holding is an otter or seal, a child or a little god, there are several things that are undeniable about her. She survived years, maybe generations, passing down a long chain of community possession, the sharp lines etched into her surface gradually smoothed. Even the jagged edges left by accidents -- at the Madonna's base, for instance, where the legs she once had seem to have been snapped off -- have been rounded off by wear.

"This has been a much used object," Hamilton says. "I believe that, given the relatively rough carving, she has been worn smooth by handling. That's what made me think she was something you would bring with you hunting, asking for her blessing, (as if she were) Diana, the goddess of the hunt."

For Hamilton, the most fascinating questions are about the maker of the figure:

"Who did it? What were they thinking as they carved it, and what was it for? What are we seeing when we look at it? I think you could base a whole series of poems on those questions."

UAF curator Odess speculates that the Madonna wasn't meant just to be a generic carving, but is a portrait of a once living person, equivalent to a loved one's snapshot the maker might have carried with him as he roved the region, foraging and hunting.

"I've looked at many, many of these sorts of figurines," Odess says. "They're all different. But during the Okvik period, especially, they each seem to have had a personality. To me that suggests they're intended to represent a specific individual."

UNIVERSAL MOTHER

That said, it is impossible not to look into the elongated face without it calling up other such faces that have often appeared in the art of human history: the Cycladic goddesses produced in white marble on the Greek island of Paros; the mammoth heads erected by the vanished people of Easter Island; the Sheila-na-gig figures found on ancient Irish churches. And this may ultimately be the source of the Madonna's secret power: Though she might be based on someone who once lived, she is ultimately a meme -- a gesture that culture repeats, over and over, because she essentializes a profound truth of being.

"I think there's something so universal to human experience in the image of a woman holding a child," Odess says, "that a piece like this reaches out across 2,000 years and retains relevance and makes the past much more accessible. Yes, these people were very different from us; they lived a long, long time ago, in a place that is utterly foreign to us, and yet, here she is holding a child, just the way my mother held me."