Baby Jesus at the breast

For the past week or so I've been busy, in an inefficient and mentally diffuse manner, with translations for the catalogue of a major exhibition about Rogier van der Weyden, kicking off in September.

Van der Weyden was Philip II's favourite old master; well, he was a lot of people's favourite old master. He conveyed the emotions of biblical episodes with a vividness that helped people imagine what it must have been like to be there - a big part of late medieval and early modern devotional practice.

In the course of background work for the translating (that is, actually trying to find the pictures being described) I came across the above picture on wikipedia, which assures me it's out of copyright (and since the original is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I imagine they're right - it's not one of the thousands of images that somebody "liberated" from behind the National Portrait Gallery's firewall)

The user statistics for this blog show that a fair number of the people who stumble across it do so by googling for pictures of Our Lady either pregnant or breastfeeding - something I blogged about in Advent last year. So I thought I'd add this one, for their benefit.
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A flaw in the system

It's surprising to see that it's been two whole months since I last posted here - I knew I hadn't been giving the blog much attention, but I hadn't realised it had been so very long.

Part of the rationale behind this blog was that it might be a way of building some sort of reflection into the day - what had been done, said, thought, or left undone - and then publicly recording any of that that might conceivably be of interest to others (and while I might be a poor judge of the latter, dear read, nobody is forced to read this stuff!). But one of the first casualties of things left undone has been regular daily reflection. Ho hum.
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