A Marian Feast Day and Marian Art

The virtual Marian Pilgrimage concludes on what is a Feast of Our Lady - in the Novus Ordo the Visitation, in the Usus Antiquior the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It is about that latter feast that Peter Kwasniewski writes on the New Liturgical Movement in a trenchant piece about how the Virgin Mary is perceived and consequently depicted in church and liturgical art. His comments would however be appropriate to any Feast of Our Lady, or indeed as a reflection for any day of the year.

The article can be read at “Mighty Conquering Warrior”: The Queenship of Mary

I think Dr Kwasniewski cogently expresses in it something of what I have felt for a while when looking at quite a lot of modern, or relatively modern depictions of the Virgin. The sentimentality of not a few of these may perhaps go back further than he suggests to eighteenth century ideas, but mass-production and reproduction has increased both the actual numbers and their distribution. The fact that quite a lot of these productions are frankly bad art does not help. A sickly sweet, simpering spirituality is no advertisement for the claims of the Virgin. Both St Bernadette and Ssor Lucia were profoundly distressed by what artists created as images of their visions of Our Lady at Lourdes and Fatima.

Great art, and it is of course true that devotion to Our Lady has inspired a vast deposit of very great art indeed, does manage to combine and evoke both, or maybe all, the qualities of Mary. This can be by the use of symbols in colour and attributes or by the facial expression. The humble mother in Bethlehem can still exude regal beneficence, as in Stefan Lochner’s masterpiece Madonna of the Rose Bower

Stefan Lochner Madonna of the Rose Bower, c. 1440–1442. 

Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

Image: Wikipedia 

I will conclude with a personal reminiscence from my Anglican days as Parish Clerk at St Giles in Pontefract from round about 1990. Through my instrumentality ( but that is another story ) the parish acquired a dignified statue of the Virgin and Child from a local convent that was down-sizing. This was to go eventually into the Lady Chapel and to be the replacement for one that had got “lost” during a vacancy quite some time beforehand. It was a copy of a popular image from the inter-war period with a tall and slender robed figure of the Virgin. The rather shallow diadem she wore had been painted out at some point and it was lost in the folds of her veil. After a dash round the likely shops a small pot of Humbrol gold model paint and a fine brush were obtained and with a careful hand I soon rectified the state of Our Lady’s crown in time for the imminent Feast of the Assumption. Subsequently the statue had a proper restoration and was secured on a bracket in the chapel, and with a faculty to ensure its legal right to remain.