Speaking Truth to Power

Today being the Memorial of the Beheading of St John the Baptist gives another reason to post a Van der Weyden reproduction, this one borrowed from Olga's Gallery:

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Feast of the Assumption

Rather than go with "blessed be the breasts which gave suck to Christ our Lord" I thought this might be nice:


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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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Fourth Anniversary

This evening we went to Mass at the Cathedral in Brussels for a change - Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnes Dei sung in Latin, the rest of the Mass a pretty even split between French and Dutch. I'll never get used to the way they give half the sermon in each language (bizarrely, de Lubac was quoted in a language I understand at near-native level, but Newman wasn't).

The Cardinal, flanked by half a dozen bishops and/or monseigneurs (I'm none too clear just who gets to wear a ?purple skullcap), offered the Mass in celebration of the anniversary of the present pope's election, 4 years ago tomorrow. I've never seen so many children in a Belgian church all at once. The bidding prayers were all explicitly for various papal intentions; the sermon (what I could make of it, between the children's noise and the cardinal's total inability to project his voice) dwelt briefly on St Catherine of Siena as a model of loyalty to the papal office.

My bad hand is throbbing from trying (and failing) to control fractious children. Still, number two son was quite in awe of the massive sword that the nave's statue of St Paul wields; and number two daughter quite liked the tiny St Michael casting down a dragon-shaped demon, carved into the wood of the main door.

Just this morning I had a JW at the door disputing my explication of Low Sunday's Gospel - and I thought they didn't "keep days"? It's a day of special importance to me, figuring in the choice of my first child's name (and if you were wondering, he isn't called Quasimodo).
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Jesus grew in Mary's womb and was fed at Mary's breasts

A week ago I was in the church of St Martinus, in Sint-Martens-Bodegem, for the first time ever. I didn't have a camera with me, or I would have snapped a shot of the statue of a visibly pregnant Mary that stood before the altar. By chance there have been news reports about another such statue (it must be said, much more visibly pregnant) in America. And reading the report just linked to (following a link from this blog) I was struck (and it seems I was not the only one so struck) by the claim that representations of a pregnant or breastfeeding Mary were uncommon in art because considered undignified. (This is perhaps why there are so few images of Jesus being born in a stable or nailed to a cross?)

If such representations really are uncommon, I have been fortunate enough to see a disproportionate number. Not so very far from here is the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Halle, whose miracles were written up by none less than Neo-Stoic philosopher Justus Lipsius. The church is one of the very few in the Low Countries to retain anything of its medieval interior, thanks to the Virgin's saving it from the Calvinist forces who attempted to surprise the town in 1580.

And on wikimedia commons: the best such painting imaginable:



This is without even considering representations of pregnancy which "peep", such as this or this...
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