01 Religious Icon, Simone Martini's Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus, with footnotes #40

Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi

Annunciation with St. Margaret (Maxima) and St. Ansanus, c. 1333

Tempera and gold on panel

305 cm × 265 cm (120 in × 104 in)

Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The work is composed of a large central panel depicting the Annunciation, and two side panels with St. Ansanus (left), and female saint, generally identified with St. Maxima or St. Margaret, in the right, and four tondos in the cusps: Jeremiah, Ezechiel, Isiah and Daniel.

The Annunciation shows the archangel Gabriel entering the house of the Virgin Mary to tell her that she will soon bear the child Jesus, whose name means "savior". Gabriel holds an olive branch in his hand, a traditional symbol of peace, while pointing at the Holy Ghost's dove with the other. The dove is descending from heaven, from the center of the mandorla of eight angels above, about to enter the Virgin's right ear. In fact, along the path of the dove, viewers see Gabriel's utterance: ave gratia plena dominvs tecvm ("Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee."). 

Mary, sitting on a throne, is portrayed at the moment that she is startled out of her reading, reacting with a graceful and composed reluctance, looking with surprise at the celestial messenger. Her dress has an arabesque-like pattern. More on this work

Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi

Detail; with St. Margaret (Maxima) and St. Ansanus

St. Maxima was a house servant and nanny to a family of imperial nobility in ancient Rome. She was given responsibility for caring for the family’s son, Ansanus, and she secretly baptized him as a child and raised him as a Christian.

When he was 19, Ansanus’ own father denounced him as a Christian during a persecution. Ansanus boldly admitted his faith, and both he and Maxima were beaten and scourged; Maxima died from these wounds. Ansanus survived, and escaped Rome and fled north. 

As he traveled, he told those he met the good news of Jesus Christ, and baptized so many people in the region near Siena that he became known as Ansanus the Baptizer. He was finally captured and beheaded by order of the emperor. More on St. Maxima and St. Ansanus

Simone Martini (c. 1284 – 1344) was an Italian painter born in Siena. He was a major figure in the development of early Italian painting and greatly influenced the development of the International Gothic style.

It is thought that Martini was a pupil of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the leading Sienese painter of his time. According to late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari, Simone was instead a pupil of Giotto di Bondone, with whom he went to Rome to paint at the Old St. Peter's Basilica, Giotto also executing a mosaic there. Martini's brother-in-law was the artist Lippo Memmi. Very little documentation of Simone's life survives, and many attributions are debated by art historians. According to E. H. Gombrich, he was a friend of Petrarch and had painted a portrait of Laura. More on Simone Martini

Lippo Memmi (c. 1291 – 1356) was an Italian painter from Siena. He was the foremost follower of Simone Martini, who was his brother-in-law.

Together with Martini, in 1333 he painted what is regarded as one of the masterworks of the International Gothic, the Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus (above), probably mainly working on the two saints. He was one of the artists who worked at Orvieto Cathedral, for which he finished the Virgin of Mercy ("Madonna dei Raccomandati"). Later he followed Martini to the Papal court in Avignon, where he worked until the mid-14th century. After his return to Siena, Memmi continued to work until his death in 1356.

Memmi's famed artwork, La Madonna della Febbre was the first venerated image of the Blessed Virgin Mary granted with a Canonical coronation by a Pope on 27 May 1631. The image has long been since held miraculous and is enshrined at the Sacristy chapel of the Blessed Sacrament inside Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. More on Lippo Memmi

 

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05 Icons, Henry Zaidan's Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified, with footnotes #80

Henry Zaidan

Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

AI Generation

neural.love

Mariam Baouardy (Arabic: مريم بواردي, or Mary of Jesus Crucified, 5 January 1846 – 26 August 1878), was a Discalced Carmelite nun of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Born to Palestinian Greek Catholic parents from the town of Hurfiesh in the upper Galilee, later moved to I’billin, she was known for her service to the poor. In addition, she became a Christian mystic who suffered the stigmata, and has been canonized by the Catholic Church.

Henry Zaidan

Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

AI Generation

neural.love

Henry Zaidan

Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

AI Generation

Available at DeviantArt

October 25th is the Feast of Our Lady of Palestine, the Patroness of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (EOHSJ).  The EOHSJ is one of just six Catholic orders recognized and protected by the Holy See. The mission of the order is to protect and preserve the presence of Christianity in the Holy Land.

Henry Zaidan

Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

AI Generation

Available at DeviantArt

Along the Gaza border, the flowers, which look like poppies, have been crowned with their own festival. It's been a major economic engine and source of local pride for nearly two decades, bringing hundreds of thousands to a little-visited and conflict-scarred part of Palestine.

Henry Zaidan

Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

AI Generation

nightcafe

Mariam Baouardy (Arabic: مريم بواردي, or Mary of Jesus Crucified, 5 January 1846 – 26 August 1878), was a Discalced Carmelite nun of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Born to Palestinian Greek Catholic parents from the town of Hurfiesh in the upper Galilee, later moved to I’billin, she was known for her service to the poor. In addition, she became a Christian mystic who suffered the stigmata, and has been canonized by the Catholic Church.

Her path to canonization solidified on 6 December 2014 with the recognition of a final miracle needed for her canonization. In the consistory of 14 February 2015, Pope Francis announced that she would be canonized on 17 May 2015; she was canonized at the Vatican. More on Mariam Baouardy

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest and deviantart

Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others. Some Images may be subject to copyright

I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

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05 Icons, Henry Zaidan's Our Lady of Palestine, with footnotes #79

Henry Zaidan

Our Lady of Palestine

AI Generation

playground

October 25th is the Feast of Our Lady of Palestine, the Patroness of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (EOHSJ).  The EOHSJ is one of just six Catholic orders recognized and protected by the Holy See. The mission of the order is to protect and preserve the presence of Christianity in the Holy Land.

Henry Zaidan

Our Lady of Palestine

AI Generation

Available at DeviantArt

Our Lady was first invoked under this title by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem as he entered the Cathedral Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre and consecrated the diocese to Mary on July 15, 1920. He asked her protection over the homeland of the Holy Family because of the ancient and growing tensions that had been threatening its people for generations.

Henry Zaidan

Our Lady Queen of Palestine

Armageddon hath trodden the virgin of Gaza as in a winepress

AI Generation

Available at DeviantArt

Along the Gaza border, the flowers, which look like poppies, have been crowned with their own festival. It's been a major economic engine and source of local pride for nearly two decades, bringing hundreds of thousands to a little-visited and conflict-scarred part of Palestine.

Mary Queen of Palestine, seated on a wooden thrown, staring ahead, Holding in her arms a model of Jerusalem, Silver oklad in relief with polychrome enamel in cloisonne decoration with stylised red poppy blossoms.

Henry Zaidan

Our Lady of Gaza

AI Generation

neural.love

The Holy Family Church of Gaza City is the only Catholic church in the Gaza Strip, State of Palestine. The parish includes a school which provides a Christian education to children in Gaza, and it works closely with the nearby religious congregations of the Missionaries of Charity, Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, and the Rosary Sisters. The Missionaries of Charity care for the elderly and disabled, and the Rosary Sisters operate a school. The community is served by priests from the Institute of the Incarnate Word. More on Holy Family Church, Gazanull    

Henry Zaidan

Our Lady of Palestine

AI Generation

neural.love

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest and deviantart

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01 Icon, Mariotto di Nardo di Cione's Stations of the Cross, Nothing has changed in over 2000 years, with footnotes #79

Mariotto di Nardo di Cione

Stations of the Cross

Officina di Santa Maria Novella

"Again, my son fell, and again my grief was overwhelming at the thought that he might die. I started to move toward him, but the soldiers prevented me."  

The Via Dolorosa (Stations of the Cross) is a processional route in the Old City of Jerusalem. It represents the path that Jesus took, forced by the soldiers, on the way to his crucifixion. The winding route from the former Antonia Fortress to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—a distance of about 600 metres (2,000 ft) is a celebrated place of Christian pilgrimage. The current route has been established since the 18th century, replacing various earlier versions. It is today marked by 14 Stations of the Cross, nine of which are outside, in the streets, with the remaining five stations being currently inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. More on the Stations of the Cross

Mariotto di Nardo di Cione, (active 1394, Firenze, d. 1424, Firenze) was an Italian painter. He was the son of the sculptor Nardo di Cione (active c. 1380) and was probably trained by his father. Realizing his talent for painting at a young age, Mariotto established himself as a painter of frescoes and panel paintings and an illuminator of manuscripts. He was in great demand for public and private commissions. Early in his career, he became the principal artist for the cathedral in his native Florence. Following suit, most of the important churches in Florence also commissioned frescoes from him, and religious orders commissioned him to paint illuminated manuscripts. He worked in Santa Maria Maggiore and at Orsanmichele.

Mariotto's interest in sculpture and his almost obsessive rendering of plastic form in painting remain constant factors in his style, which is easily identifiable and markedly different from that of his contemporaries. He worked in a conservative style with a capacity for clear story-telling, without ornament or fantasy. More on Mariotto di Nardo di Cione

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01 Religious Icon, SUNIL DAS' CHRIST, 2006, with footnotes #39

SUNIL DAS (1939 - 2015)

CHRIST, c. 2006

Acrylic on canvas

35.5 x 29.75 in   |  90 x 75.5 cm

Private collection

Estimate for $6,175-$7,410 in October 2022

Sunil Das was born in 1939 in Kolkata. He studied at the Government College of Arts and Craft, Calcutta. He also won the French Government Scholarship to study at the Ecole National des Beaux Arts in 1960. He has 50 solo shows to his credit. The artist has participated in several exhibitions in India and abroad. His works have been included in the Biennales of Paris, Dacca, and Tokyo.

He has served as Commissioner to the Sao Paulo Biennale and was member of the jury of the prix des étrangers’, Paris. Sunil Das received National Award (the Shiromani Kala Puraskar) in 1959. In fact, he has the distinction of being the only Indian artist to have won a National Award, while still an undergraduate at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata. His works hold an important place in several collections in India as well as abroad.

Sunil is an artist who always had a great control over his lines. Even though today he is best known for his bulls, his faces as well as other animals and human forms are par excellence making him one of the most sought-after artists in his generation. He is regarded as one of India’s most important post-modernist painters who rose to prominence with his drawings of horses. More on Sunil Das

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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01 Religious Icon, St. Cajetan, from Spanish Colonial Mexico, with footnotes #38

19th C. Mexican Spanish Colonial Painting

St. Cajetan

Painted on wood

33.3" L x 25.25" W (84.6 cm x 64.1 cm)

Private collection

Sold for $1,400 USD in September 2022

Spanish Colonial, Mexico, 19th century. A large Spanish Colonial painting on canvas depicting Saint Cajetan (San Cayetano). He wears the black robe of his order and a luxurious bejeweled chain thought to symbolize either his rejection of wealth since the Theatines took vows of poverty, his aristocratic upbringing as Count of Thiene, or his leadership of his order. The Crucifixion behind him refers to the mystical crucifixion he endured when Theatine brothers wanted to transport him from the hardwood floor that he slept upon to a proper bed. 

He kneels in prayer and presents a lace scarf to the Virgin and Child; a ray of holy light runs from her hand to St. Cajetan; a ray of red blood runs from the Crucifixion to St. Cajetan. Jesus is above him and the Holy Spirit in the form of a white dove flies toward the Madonna. More on this icon

Gaetano dei Conti di Thiene (6 October 1480 – 7 August 1547), known as Saint Cajetan, was an Italian Catholic priest and religious reformer, co-founder of the Theatines. He is recognised as a saint in the Catholic Church, and his feast day is 7 August.

Cajetan was born in October 1480, the son of Gaspar, lord of Thiene, and Mary Porta, persons of the first rank among the nobility of the territory of Vicenza, in Veneto Region.

His father died when he was two years of age. Quiet and retiring by nature, he was predisposed to piety by his mother. Cajetan studied law in Padua, receiving his degree as doctor utriusque juris (i.e., in civil and canon law) at age 24. In 1506 he worked as a diplomat for Pope Julius II, with whom he helped reconcile the Republic of Venice. But he was not ordained a priest until the year 1516.

With the death of Pope Julius II in 1513, Cajetan withdrew from the papal court. Recalled to Vicenza by the death of his mother, he founded in 1522 a hospital for incurables there. By 1523 he had established a hospital in Venice, as well. His interests were as much or more devoted to spiritual healing than the physical kind, and he joined a confraternity in Rome called the "Oratory of Divine Love". He intended to form a group that would combine the spirit of monasticism with the exercises of the active ministry.

In 1533 he founded a house in Naples. The year 1540 found him in Venice again and from there he extended his work to Verona. He founded a bank to help the poor and offer an alternative to usurers. It later became the Banco di Napoli.

Cajetan died in Naples on 7 August 1547. His remains are in the church of San Paolo Maggiore in Naples; outside the church is Piazza San Gaetano, with a statue. More on Gaetano dei Conti di Thiene

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01 Religious Icon, Andrei Rublev's Trinity, with footnotes #37

Andrei Rublev  (–1430)

The Trinity, c. between 1408 and 1427

Rublev's famous icon showing the three Angels being hosted by Abraham at Mambré

Tempera on panel

height: 141.5 cm (55.7 in); width: 114 cm (44.8 in)

Tretyakov Gallery

The Trinity was painted on a vertically aligned board. It depicts three angels sitting at a table. On the table, there is a cup containing the head of a calf. In the background, Rublev painted a house (supposedly Abraham's house), a tree (the Oak of Mamre), and a mountain (Mount Moriah). The figures of angels are arranged so that the lines of their bodies form a full circle. The middle angel and the one on the left bless the cup with a hand gesture. There is no action or movement in the painting. The figures gaze into eternity in the state of motionless contemplation.

The icon is based on a story from the Book of Genesis called Abraham and Sarah's Hospitality or The Hospitality of Abraham. It says that the biblical Patriarch Abraham 'was sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day' by the Oak of Mamre and saw three men standing in front of him, who in the next chapter were revealed as angels. 'When he saw them, Abraham ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.' Abraham ordered a servant-boy to prepare a choice calf, and set curds, milk and the calf before them, waiting on them, under a tree, as they ate. One of the angels told Abraham that Sarah would soon give birth to a son. More on The Trinity

Andrei Rublev was a Muscovite icon painter born in the 1360s who died between 1427 and 1430 in Moscow. He is considered to be one of the greatest medieval Russian painters of Orthodox Christian icons and frescos.

Little information survives about his life; even where he was born is unknown. The first mention of Rublev is in 1405, when he decorated icons and frescos for the Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Moscow Kremlin, in company with Theophanes the Greek and Prokhor of Gorodets. Theophanes was an important Byzantine master, who moved to Russia and is considered to have trained Rublev.

Chronicles tell us that together with Daniel Chorny he painted the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir in 1408 as well as the Trinity Cathedral in the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius between 1425 and 1427. After Daniel's death, Andrei came to Moscow's Andronikov Monastery where he painted his last work, the frescoes of the Saviour Cathedral. He is also believed to have painted at least one of the miniatures in the Khitrovo Gospels.

The only work authenticated as entirely his is the icon of the Trinity (c. 1410, currently in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). It is based on an earlier icon known as the "Hospitality of Abraham". Rublev removed the figures of Abraham and Sarah from the scene, and through a subtle use of composition and symbolism changed the subject to focus on the Mystery of the Trinity.

In Rublev's art two traditions are combined: the highest asceticism and the classic harmony of Byzantine mannerism. The characters of his paintings are always peaceful and calm. After some time his art came to be perceived as the ideal of Eastern Church painting and of Orthodox iconography. More on Andrei Rublev

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