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.
If the line above this one is blank, click here to read on ...
