In Mary’s arms, a baby to whom his father gave the name of Jesus peers at the Scripture passage also, to find out what passage his mother is meditating on, it seems, rather than to learn from it how to become what he is. The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Is 11:1-2) There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.Īnd the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, Mary the Mother of God is meditating on a passage from chapter 11 of the Book of Isaiah which begins with these words: When she speaks about this Virgin and Child in her journal, Queen Victoria writes: “This picture is quite like an old master, and in the style of Raphael-so chaste and exquisitely painted.” Indeed, there is no denying the influence of Raphael, in particular of his Small Cowper Madonna, painted in 1505. She contemplated them ceaselessly for forty more years, until her death in 1901. After the death of the Prince in late 1861-a tragedy from which Victoria never recovered-the Queen had the two paintings hung in her bedroom as companion pieces. Having brought these two works together, the royal couple enthroned them as the tutelary image of their union. The following year, they commissioned from the same artist a Saint Joseph, who was to be depicted at the same age as Prince Albert at that time, 27 years old. So it was that in 1845 Albert gave this Virgin and Child to Victoria as a gift. On every birthday and wedding anniversary, they presented works of art to each other. And so art and the spiritual life were the expressions and the places that they considered most worthy of accounting for the ineffable dimension of their love. Moreover, they themselves were talented and accomplished artists. Over the course of their 21 years of marriage they were happy and had nine children.īesides being highly cultured and religious, both Albert and Victoria were lovers of art and discriminating patrons. What difference did that make?! She resisted all the pressures, and as soon as she had sufficiently established her power in 1840 certain also that she had the support of the people, who were captivated by her romantic love story-she entered a sacramental union with the man her heart had chosen. Now she was in love with Ernest’s younger brother, Albert, who unfortunately was by no means of suitable aristocratic rank. And what she wanted in this instance was to marry for love. The world would discover during her long reign (63 years) that she was a woman who knew what she wanted. They chose her cousin, Prince Ernest, the older son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Immediately, according to the custom of the times, her mother and the government busied themselves with finding a suitable husband for a Queen of England. When Queen Victoria inherited the British throne in 1837, just a few weeks after her 18 th birthday, she was a passionate young woman, both open-minded and faithful to the highest human and Christian values. The destiny of this Virgin and Child, a work by the famous Scottish painter William Dyce (1806–1864), is closely connected to a beautiful royal romance which has never ceased to stir the hearts of the English people.
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