Giovanni Segantini

Giovanni Segantini (January 15, 1858 - September 28, 1899)
Choir of St Anthony 1879,
119x85 cm, Oil on Canvas,
Private Collection

Giovanni Segantini (January 15, 1858 - September 28, 1899)
Ave Maria a trasbordo (1st version) 1882
Oil on Canvas , cm 84x64,5
Private collection, Zurich

Giovanni Segantini (January 15, 1858 - September 28, 1899)
Frühmesse, 1885/86,
108x211cm, Oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
L’amore alla fonte della vita (or La fonte della giovinezza, Gli amanti alla fonte della vita) 1896 Oil on canvas, cm 70x98
Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
L'angelo della vita (Angel of Life) 1896
cm 59,5x43
St.Moritz, Museum Segantini

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
The Punishment of Lust 1891
Oil on canvas, 99 x 172.8cm
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
Il dolore confortato dalla Fede (Il conforto della Fede)
Oil canvas 85.5 x 132 cm;
Kunsthalle. Hamburg

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
The Fruits of Love 1889.
88.2 x 57.2cm.
Museum der bildenden Künste. Leipzig

Giovanni Segantini (Italian, 1858-1899)
Benedizione delle pecore (Blessing of the sheep)1884.
198 x 120 cm.
St.Moritz, Museum Segantini

Giovanni Segantini (January 15, 1858 - September 28, 1899) came from an old mountain family in Arco, near Lake Garda, Italy.

At age seven he ran away and was later found perishing of cold and hunger.He began to earn his bread by herding flocks in the hills and there he spent his long hours of solitude in drawing.

After more flights and more returns, Segantini finally settled in Milan to attend classes at the Brera. In Milan he was able to earn a living by teaching art and painting portraits.

His first picture, The Choir of Sant Antonio was noticed for its powerful quality. In it he used a technique, similar to Pointillism or Neo-Impressionism, that he had developed, apparently, simply by means of observing light and color at first hand.

He settled in Brianza, near Como. There he gave himself up to the study of mountain life, and became the painter of the Alps.

At this time he painted the Ave Maria, which took a gold medal at the Amsterdam Exhibition (1883),

Segantini died at Maloja in October 1899 while working on his famous piece Alpentriptychon.

For more see

The Segantini Museum (San Moritz)

For an interesting commentary on his life and one of his works see The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: Artwork of the Month - March, 2000 'The Punishment of Lust, also known as The Punishment of Luxury, 1891', by Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899)

A Break From Blogging

I`ll be taking a break until after Christmas.

A very merry and happy Christmas to one and all

Resting on the Flight to Egypt

Arnold Böcklin (Basle 16 October 1827 – Fiesole 16 January 1901)
Le Repos pendant la fuite en Égypte (Panneau de Gauche) 1868
Fresco 231 x 301.5 cm
Öffentliche Kunstsammlung.
Kunstmuseum. Bâle.

Böcklin was a symbolist Swiss painter.

His allegorical and fantastical paintings, many based on mythical creatures, anticipated 20th-century surrealism

In 1848, when he was in Paris, he was caught up in the confusion of the February Revolution.

The following years he spent in Rome, and it was in the mid-1850s that the first mythological figures featured in his Roman landscape.

At the age of twenty-five, during one of his stays in Rome, he had married the daughter of a pontifical guard who bore him eleven children between 1855 and 1876

Böcklin was an energetic figure devoid of the languid melancholy of 'decadence'.

I heard a voice

King's College Choir Cambridge

And the Glory...

From The Messiah - The Choir of King's College, Cambridge

Pre-Raphaelite Nativities

Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
The Nativity
Ponsonby Church, Ponsonby, Cumbria, England

Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
The Nativity [detail]
Ponsonby Church, Ponsonby, Cumbria, England

Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
The Nativity [detail]
Ponsonby Church, Ponsonby, Cumbria, England

Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
Adoration of the Magi
Trinity Church, Saugerties, New York

Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
The Nativity
Trinity Church, Saugerties, New York


Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
Nativity windows,
Trinity Church, Boston


Manufacturer William Morris
Designer Edward Burne-Jones
Nativity windows, [detail]
Trinity Church, Boston

William Morris (March 24, 1834 – October 3, 1896) was an English artist, writer, and socialist.

He was one of the principal founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement, a pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain, and a writer of poetry and fiction.

He is perhaps best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics

Morris was part of a group of friends and collaborators, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb. These friends formed an artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In 1861, he founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb. In 1874 Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown decided to leave the firm, requiring a return on their shares which proved to be a costly business. Throughout his life, he continued to work in his own firm, although the firm changed names. Its most famous incarnation was as Morris and Company. The company encouraged the revival of traditional crafts such as stained glass painting.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet (28 August 1833–17 June 1898) was largely responsible for bringing the Pre-Raphaelites into the mainstream of the British art world, while at the same time executing some of the most exquisite and beautiful artwork of the time.

After leaving Oxford, from which he did not take a degree, he became closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in England

He had intended to become a church minister, but under Morris's influence decided to become an artist and designer instead.

The Saint John's Bible

Donald Jackson, with a contribution from Aidan Hart
'Vision of the Son of Man, Daniel 7:9-14'
Illuminated bible page
2005
Hand ground ink, watercolour and gold leaf on calfskin vellum
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library Collection

Sally Mae Joseph
'Now the Word, Jeremiah 1:4-10'
Illuminated bible page
2004
Colour hand-ground Japanese stick ink, shell (powder) gold on calfskin vellum
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library Collection

The production of The Saint John's Bible is a combination of the ancient and modern. It emulates the spirit of the great medieval Bibles, using animal skin, handmade quills and natural, hand-ground inks and pigments. Yet at the same time it incorporates the latest computer technology and contemporary texts (the New Revised Standard Version).

The seven volumes of the Bible will eventually be bound in 200-year-old Welsh oak boards and permanently housed in the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John's Abbey & University.

For many years Donald Jackson, Senior Illuminator to Her Majesty's Crown Office, had dreamed of creating a modern, illuminated Bible to celebrate the new millennium. Finally, in November 1995, he presented the idea to Saint John's Benedictine Abbey & University in Minnesota.

Work started in 2000 and is scheduled for completion in 2007, at a total cost of over £2 million. It is taking place in a scriptorium in Monmouth, Wales, under the artistic direction of Donald Jackson and his team of scribes and illuminators

For more information see The Saint John's Bible website

José Villegas Cordero

José Villegas Cordero (Seville, 1844 - Madrid, 1921)
La antesala de su Eminencia (The ante-room of his Eminence) 1890
68 x 100 cm.
Private collection, Barcelona.


José Villegas Cordero (Seville, 1844 - Madrid, 1921)
Las dos potencias (The two powerbrokers) 1889
84 x 64 cm.
Colección Segundo Pérez. Seville

Swimming reindeer

Anonymous
Swimming reindeer
Length: 20.700 cm
Carved from the tip of a mammoth tusk
Late Magdalenian, around 12,500 years old.
From the rockshelter of Montastruc, Tarn et Garonne, France
British Museum, London

The British Museum website (Room 2) describes it so:

"This is one of the most beautiful pieces of Stone Age art ever found. It shows two reindeer, one behind the other. The figure in front is a female with smaller body and antlers. Her coat is delicately shaded. The larger male figure is not shaded but his strong body is clearly carved. On both animals the antlers are laid along the back and the legs are folded underneath, with the exception of the back left leg of the male which originally extended behind. The sex of each animal is clearly shown.

With their noses up and antlers back the carving appears to show the reindeer swimming. Other swimming reindeer are known, for example in a painted frieze in the cave of Lascaux. The tapering shape of the mammoth tusk may also have decided the shape of the animals, which are perfectly modelled from all angles."

CSI Scotland: Six bodies identified as six bishops

Skull of Bishop Henry (d. 1293), Augustinian abbot and bishop, most notable for holding the positions of Abbot of Holyrood [1236 - 1253 or1255] and Bishop of Galloway [1253–1293].

Archaeologists have successfully identified the remains of six medieval bishops of Whithorn who died between 1200-1360.

The bones had been discovered during the 1957-67 excavation at Whithorn Priory but who they belonged to was a mystery.

The bishops were in an especially holy area between the high altar and the shrine of St Ninian – the man credited with bringing Christianity to what later became Scotland.

Radiocarbon dating helped identify the graves of bishops Walter (d. 1235), Henry (d. 1293), Michael (d. 1359) and Thomas (d. 1362).

Analysis also showed that Bishop Henry had been suffering from tooth abcesses.

Other bishops identified were Gilbert (d. 1253) and Michael (d. 1359).

One of the most impressive finds from the excavation was of a gilded and enamelled crozier head of a type that dates from around 1175.

The grave also contained brocade threads from vestments, gilded sequins from his headdress, and silver altar vessels. This has now been identified as the grave of bishop Simon (died 1355), meaning the crozier was an antique when buried.

The central grave was being used for a second time and had originally been the burial place of bishop John (d. 1209).

The bones had been discovered during the 1957-67 excavation at Whithorn Priory but who they belonged to was a mystery - until now.

Keeping the finds in storage, to minimise deterioration, kept them safe while research techniques advanced and may mean that future archaeologists will be able to learn even more from them.

However one does wonder if the remains of the bishops should now be buried or should they still be kept in storage ?

St. Ninian is a shadowy figure in history. He is acknowledged as Scotland's first saint with the date AD 397 celebrated as the beginning of his mission to his people.

Whithorn is the home of the earliest recorded Christian community in Scotland and was the episcopal seat of Bishop Ninian, the apostle of the southern Picts.

Northumbrians established a bishopric at Whithorn in about 730 AD and set about building this next, more substantial, church incorporating not only the pillars of the shrine, but also the steps leading to it.

Later the church was divided into two and the East part became a burial chapel. Evidence of stained glass indicates that it was an important building.

Whithorn became an ecclesiastical burgh in about 1307 and was totally re-built as a Cathedral.

The town grew in size and importance, especially around the 1500's.

During the reformation, in 1581, pilgrimage was banned in Scotland and Whithorn transformed from a centre of national importance into a small country town


For more details of the identification of the Bishops` remains, see Historic Scotland

For brief articles on what is known of the lives of the various bishops "re-discovered" see The Wikipeda article on Bishop of Galloway and follow the links for each of the bishops.

Annigoni and Social Realism: Sermon on the Mount

Pietro Annigoni [7 June 1910 - 28 October 1988]
Sermon on the Mount. 1953
Tempera on board
118 x 157 3/8 inches (300 x 400 cm)
Private collection

Anchorites

Pietro Annigoni 1910-1988
Anchorites in the Desert
Anacoreti nel Deserto
Tempera on board
Private collection

Anchorite (male)/anchoress (female), is someone who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular society so as to be able to lead an intensely prayer-oriented, ascetic and, circumstances permitting, Eucharist-focused life.

As a result, anchorites are usually considered to be a type of religious hermit.

The anchoritic life is one of the earliest forms of Christian monastic living and originated before the religious life in community.

Offering

Ramón Pichot Gironés (Spanish, 1872-1925)
Offering 1898.
Oil on canvas. 165 x 120 cm.
Museu Nacional d'Arts de Catalunya. Barcelona. España.

Gironès painted in an impressionist style.

He was a good friend of Pablo Picasso and an early mentor to the young Salvador Dalí.

Virgin and Child

Alfonso Ramil Garín 1864-1924
La Virgen con el niño

Greenland

Rockwell Kent, (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971)
Christian Graves. South Greenland 1929
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia


Rockwell Kent, (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971)
Greenlanders (Near Godhavn) 1932
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

A transcendentalist and mystic, Kent painted remote and austere lands, including Newfoundland (1914-15), Tierra del Fuego (1922-23), and Greenland (1929; 1931-32; 1934-35).

Kent's reputation in the United States declined in the 1950s and 1960s, and he became a target of McCarthyism. In 1960 Kent donated several hundred paintings and drawings to the Soviet people

In 2001, Kent was featured in a U.S. Post Office commemorative stamp series honoring American illustrators, including Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington, and 16 others

New Papal Portrait

After the general audience on Wednesday, Russian artist Natalia Tsarkova presented the Holy Father with a full length portrait of himself during one of the rare private audiences granted by the Pope.

The portrait is 6-foot by 4-foot and shows the Pope wearing a gold mitre and rich red vestments, seated on the throne of Leo XIII.

Miss Tsarkova worked for almost a year on the portrait.

She has previously executed portraits of Pope John Paul II.

The Longest Night: The Shortest Day

Wit, Jacob de 1695 - 1754
Saint Lucy c.1751
Watercolour on paper
Height: 18 cm; Width: 22.5 cm
Courtauld Institute, London

Today is the Feast day of St Lucy of Syracuse. It is the shortest day of the year: also the longest night.

Saint Lucy of Syracuse, also known as Saint Lucia, Santa Lucia, or Saint Lukia, (traditional dates 283-304) was a rich young Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint by Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

All that is really known for certain is that she was a martyr in Syracuse in Diocletian's persecutions of A.D. 304. Her veneration spread to Rome, so that by the 6th century the whole Church recognized her courage in defence of the faith.

In medieval accounts, St. Lucy's eyes are gouged out prior to her execution.

In art, her eyes sometimes appear on a plate that she's holding.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.

by John Donne


'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

Elizabeth and Zacharias

Sir Stanley Spencer 1891-1959
Zacharias and Elizabeth 1913-14
Oil and pencil on canvas
support: 1426 x 1428 x 24 mm
The Tate Gallery, London

In St Luke’s gospel, Zacharias is sacrificing in a temple when he is visited by the archangel Gabriel. Gabriel tells him that, although his wife Elizabeth is past childbearing age, she will bear a child from God. He will grow up to become John the Baptist.

Spencer imagined the story in a garden behind his studio in Cookham. He wrote: ‘It was to be a painting characterizing and exactly expressing the life I was … living and seeing about me… to raise that life round me to what I felt was its true status, meaning and purpose.’

Our Lady of Guadeloupe

Salvador Dali (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989),
La Virgen de Guadalupe 1959.
Oil on canvas. 200 x 130 cm.

With the Brief Non est equidem of May 25, 1754, Pope Benedict XIV declared Our Lady of Guadalupe patron of what was then called New Spain, corresponding to Spanish Central and Northern America, and approved liturgical texts for the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours in her honour.

Pope Saint Pius X proclaimed her patron of Latin America in 1910.

In 1935 Pope Pius XI proclaimed her patron of the Philippines and had a monument in her honor erected in the Vatican Gardens.

Pope Pius XII declared the Virgin of Guadalupe “Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas” in 1945, and "Patroness of the Americas" in 1946.

At the request of the Special Assembly for the Americas of the Synod of Bishops, Pope John Paul II named Our Lady of Guadalupe patron of the Americas on January 22, 1999 (with the result that her liturgical celebration had, throughout the Americas, the rank of solemnity), and visited the shrine again on the following day.

In 2002, he included in the General Calendar of the Roman Rite, as optional memorials, the liturgical celebrations of Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (December 9) and Our Lady of Guadalupe (12 December).

The Visitation

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973),
La Visita [The Visitation] 1902.
Oil on canvas. 152 x 100 cm.
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Russia

Noah`s Ark

Albano Vitturi (1888-1968)
L'Arca di Noè [Noah`s Ark] 1935-1936.
Oil on board. 63 x 78 cm.
Private collection

Eakins` Portraits of Clergy in America

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916)
Portrait of Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli (1902)
Oil on canvas
Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Centre, Los Angeles
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916)
Portrait of Archbishop William Henry Elder
Oil on canvas 66 1/8 x 41 1/8 inches
Cincinnati Art Museum
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916)
Monsignor Diomede Falconia (1905)
Oil on canvas, 183.2 x 137.7 cm (72 1/8 x 54 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC


Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was one of the greatest American painters of his time, an innovating teacher, and an uncompromising realist.

In his time, however, the artist from Philadelphia suffered neglect which he did not merit.

For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealisation or even simple verisimilitude. It provided the opportunity to reveal the character of an individual through the modeling of a solid anatomical form.

The known number of Eakins's portraits is 247, including the only one he ever painted of himself, and they vary in scale from intimate to grand, his subjects either sitting or standing.

His art is unfussy, blunt, direct. He preferred to explore the truth of what he saw, which is not to say that he did not discover beauty or dignity in his contemplation. A critic observed that Eakins was an "annihilator of vanity". Many clients complained that he made them look older than they were. In fact, Eakins painted very slowly and tended not to talk much while painting; this often lulled his sitters into a meditative repose, bereft of the rejuvenating sparkle that full attention brings.

One Philadelphia gentleman joked, Eakins “would bring out all the traits of my character that I had been trying to hide from the public for years.”

All this made Eakins a specialty taste.

"I never knew but one artist who could resist the temptation to see things as they ought to be, rather than as they are, and that's Tom Eakins.", his friend,Walt Whitman, said of him.

In 1900, he became acquainted with several Roman Catholic clergymen at the St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Philadelphia suburb of Overbrook. The year before he met the clerics, his father had died. Eakins himself was an agnostic, but in the intellectual companionship and quiet monastic atmosphere of the seminary, he found inspiration.

Sundays, he and a young protege named Samuel Murray would ride their bicycles out to St. Charles, spend the day chatting with the priests. He eagerly seized the opportunity to portray four clerics as well as a prominent Catholic layman.

Not all of the clerics liked what he saw. The rector of St. Charles, Patrick Garvey, remembered today as a "stern, quarrelsome but good-looking man," concealed his picture under the bed.

"Eakins," Whitman once said, "is not a painter, he is a force."

To criticisms of Eakins' portrayal, Whitman retorted: "It is likely to be only the unusual person who can enjoy such a picture—only here and there one who can weigh and measure it according to its own philosophy. Eakins would not be appreciated by ... professional elects: the people who like Eakins best are the people who have no art prejudices to interpose."

He went on to paint other priests, bishops and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. In all he painted 14 portraits of Roman Catholic clergy.

In 1902, he painted a “Portrait of the Rt. Rev. John J. Fedigan, 1902,” which he described as "a major work" He painted it for the Augustinian Order at what was then Villanova College and is still in the possession of Villanova University today. The large work measures nearly 8' x 4' feet.

For this masterwork and its history, see Eakins’ Little-Known Treasure in Villanova Magazine (Spring 2007) (.pdf file)


Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli (20 August 1848 - 4 July 1918) was a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and was former Prefect of the Congregation of Rites.

Sebastiano Martinelli was born in Borgo Sant'Anna within the Archdiocese of Lucca, Italy.

He was ordained on 4 March 1871 in Rome. He served as a Professor of theology at the Collegio "Santa Maria in Pusterula", Rome. Named postulator causarum servorum Dei of the Augustinian order in 1881. He was Prior general of his Order in 1889 and was reelected in 1895. He was appointed as apostolic delegate to the United States on 18 April 1896 by Pope Leo XIII.

He was created and proclaimed Cardinal-Priest of S. Agostino by Pope Leo XIII on 15 April 1901.

He participated in conclave of 1903 that elected Pope Pius X.

He served alongside Pietro Cardinal Gasparri as a member of the commission for the codification of canon law between 1906 and 1917.

He was appointed as Camerlengo of the Sacred College of Cardinals on 15 April 1907 until April 29, 1909

The portrait is an astonishingly solitary portrait of the Cardinal. One cannot but stare into its disturbing brown abyss.

William Henry Elder (1819 - 1904) was a U.S. archbishop who was Roman Catholic Bishop of Natchez from 1857 to 1880 and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Cincinnati between 1883 and 1904.

Archbishop Diomede Falconio was the Italian-born Apostolic Delegate to the United States. He posed for Eakins in Washington, D.C., where he resided at the Catholic University of America. As a poor Franciscan friar, he normally shunned the impressive gray silk robes that he wears here.

For unknown reasons, the canvas is unfinished. The face and hands appear completed, but the vestments, chair, carpet, and wall paneling have not received their final details.

The church scholar, at age sixty-three, was only two years older than the painter

Mère Geneviève Gallois

Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Self portrait (before she took the veil)
Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
L'un chante, l'autre donne le ton
Coll. Blaise Alexandre. París.

Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Le feu: plus je tape, plus il pétille
Coll. Rose Arjalliès. París
Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Les Postulantes

Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Messe-couleurs: à plat ventre pour les litanies 1949
Coll. Etienne Alexandre. Ingouville

Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Messe-couleurs: Confiteor
Coll. Etienne Alexandre. Ingouville

Mère Geneviève Gallois (1888 - 1962)
Suscipe me Domine

She was born Marcelle Gallois. She was an art student in Paris. She was violently anti-clerical as the temper of the times in Paris dictated. She was a rebel.

What brought her to the Benedictines was a combination of aesthetic and religious feelings that for years left her vocation in doubt.

She described a memorable Easter-week visit, at the age of 23, to church services at the convent she later entered.

From the shadows came the slow, profound chanting of Jeremiah's Lament for Christ.

Her attention was riveted on a Benedictine monk who might have been a figure in one of her own drawings today.

"He had an air which did not please me, an aspect rough and terrible. He was wearing a strange, black costume—austere, and with lines that recalled an earlier, more primitive age—a pointed hood, a belt of leather. What end was he seeking? I wondered. The austere grandeur of his habit, of that belt which hung from his waist, somehow entangled my heart in a way that was incurable."

In 1917 she was admitted to the Benedictines of the Rue Monsieur. Her family never accepted the vocation.

The way she had chosen was not easy for Geneviève (the name she took as a nun, from the patron saint of Paris).

The abbess said: "Geneviève wanted to arrive all at once. She tried too hard."

The rigorous austerities of the Benedictines, whose daily Mass begins at 5 a.m., broke her health. For 22 years she remained a novice.

The nuns looked on her work as something strange and disturbing.

As she got older, her hands became cramped with arthritis.

However in the late 1940s, her work began to be recognised outside the convent. Paul Alexandre, the first to understand Modigliani’s genius, was bedazzled when he discovered Mother Geneviève’s art. In 1950, the art world "discovered" her and she became recognised. Even the nuns in her convent began to see the value of her work.

Her work moves unceasingly between gravity, humour and deep exultation, and constitutes one of the most beautiful modern collections dedicated to monastic life, if not the human condition.

Darfur: The tragedy that will come back to haunt us

In The Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins discusses the European response to what is happening in Darfur.

After Rwanda, it was not supposed to happen.


Three years have passed since the British government, in the form of Jack Straw, declared states of affairs in both Darfur and Zimbabwe “unacceptable”.

A year later in the case of Darfur this was upgraded to “completely unacceptable”.

A feelgood Global Day for Darfur was declared, helped on its way by George Clooney and Elton John. Needless to say, the government accepted what was unacceptable – and has done so ever since.

Today Gordon Brown has decided to stay in bed rather than go to the European Union's Africa summit in Lisbon, thus avoiding the improbable risk of having to smile at Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese dictator. ...

While diplomats concentrate on being beastly to Mugabe, carnage continues in Darfur and spreads into adjacent Chad. It makes a mockery of the new “liberal interventionism” declared his greatest achievement by Tony Blair, and since endorsed by Brown.

In Rwanda in 1994, western powers could at least argue that the massacre took them by surprise. No such excuse is available in Darfur. The horror has been unfolding in full view of the world for three years.

The interventionists have hollered and abused and seized microphones and achieved nothing. The Sudan government’s Arab Janjaweed irregulars, aided by air support, have continued with killings. This has been in response to a separatist rebellion similar to that which was partially successful in southern Sudan, resolved in 2002.

In Darfur some 300,000 people have been massacred, 2m driven into exile and 4m left dependent on western aid in a network of more than 60 refugee camps. Servicing these camps, according to Oxfam’s Alun MacDonald, is now more dangerous “than at any time since the entire conflict began, by a considerable way”. Aid convoys are attacked, aid workers killed and agencies may soon have to withdraw, precipitating a medieval migration across the Sahara.

An inadequate African Union force of 7,000 has proved unable to cope with a renewed Janjaweed onslaught, complicated by feuds between the rebel groups. This force is enhanced by a 26,000-strong United Nations army, deploying with excruciating slowness because Khartoum objects to it containing non-Africans.

All comment on the UN force regards it as too late, too small and too ramshackle to halt what is a raging civil war across a territory the size of France. It has not one helicopter out of its supposed complement of 24. Last week the British Foreign Office bleakly offered to hire a few from a private contactor, if they could be found. This intervention, stimulated by the West, has failure already built-in.

Gesture diplomacy has boosted the self-righteousness of the Khartoum regime on the one hand and encouraged the rebels, now split into a dozen factions, on the other. As a result the rolling autonomy accepted in the south has not taken root. Rebels walked out of the last peace talks.

While comparing horrors is odious, Darfur should outrank Afghanistan or Iraq as a cause for intervention. It ticks the boxes of Blair’s Chicago speech on the use of military force. There is an ongoing human catastrophe. There is a sovereign government apparently to blame. The whole region is inflamed. The UN has called for action in innumerable resolutions. Darfur is more open and shut even than Kosovo.

So why are Britain’s macho interventionists suddenly so timid? Why are they not summoning troops to the flag as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead falling back on limp condemnations and armchair diplomacy? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Darfur is Africa and that to western interventionists black people matter less than whites or browns.

A small job such as Sierra Leone can be handled, but Sudan is a desert land of which they know little. Europe’s frontier in former Yugoslavia is worth shedding British blood, as are the oilfields of Mesopotamia and the old imperial borders of the Punjab. Africa is different, even the Africa over which, in the case of Sudan, Britain once ruled with credit. Words must suffice.

There is, of course, a subplot here. The motive behind the Lisbon summit is somehow to rescue Europe’s former “backyard” custodianship of Africa at a time when China, Russia and India are being welcomed with open arms.

In November last year the China/Africa summit of 45 nations in Beijing celebrated a tenfold rise in China’s trade with Africa.

Britain can boss dictators in the Muslim world but oil-rich Africans are increasingly disinclined to kowtow to the West. Since the end of colonialism, African states have suffered two ideological imports from Europe, aid-rich socialist planning and aid-rich IMF/World Bank free-marketeering. Both have impoverished most of the countries on which they were imposed. Yet still they are lectured on failed governance and corruption – from the EU of all hypocrites.

Chinese diplomats do not tell African dictators of their “unacceptability”. They do not threaten to arrest their ministers and haul them before the International Criminal Court for war crimes. They do not hector Mugabe or demand that Bashir accept UN troops. They just want to buy oil.

The EU in Lisbon appears in supplicant mode. It lets its bluff be called on Mugabe’s travel plans and declares Africa the “equal” of Europe. Jose Manuel Barroso, the EU president, patronises the absent Brown by saying that leadership requires “being prepared to meet people your mother would not like to meet”. This comes from an EU apparat that would sell its mother into slavery rather than risk an African boycott of Lisbon and thus endanger its most cherished perk, a lavish junket at our expense.

Neither Britain nor any western state will intervene in Zimbabwe or Sudan in the only way that might make any difference, by military force. On this point Blair in Kosovo was right: armchair intervention is cynical, ineffective and probably counter-productive. Those who wish to change a foreign government, for whatever reason, must be ready to fight. You cannot, as Kipling said, sing Rule Britannia and go “killing Kruger with your mouth”. Regime abuse is not regime change.

Modern Britain is so lacking in global clout that it cannot even persuade Europe to make Mugabe stay at home or shame Khartoum into respecting the innocence of a British teacher. What hope is there that London might change the dynamic in Khartoum or Harare?

In 1916 the British drew the borders of strife-torn Sudan, embracing once-autonomous Darfur. For years it flattered and subsidised Mugabe. Africans are now reaping what Britain sowed but there is nothing London can do since it is recklessly overextended in Basra and Helmand. It would do most good by shutting up.

Alex de Waal, historian of Darfur, describes it as displaying “the basic pattern of grievances shared by all the world’s marginalised peoples”. Its miserable and intractable conflict will be resolved only when the finally exhausted parties agree to peace. This is currently prevented “by the perfidy and ruthlessness of the Sudan government and the incompetence and vanity of the armed movements”.

For four years the West has cried: something must be done, action must be taken, troops must be sent. What and by whom is not stated. Ever since the UN, goaded by America and Britain, abandoned its former respect for national sovereignties, nobody has defined liberal intervention as anything but a jerking of the knee.

Worse, the examples of East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kurdistan and now Darfur suggest that any separatist movement is well advised to resort to arms and atrocity to secure western sympathy or support.

Global policing has strayed far from the goal of defending borders and organising humanitarian aid. By extending its remit to the internal politics of states, liberal intervention is becoming an enemy not a friend of peace.

Lacking imperialism’s permanent commitment to a conquered land, it has become a half-hearted meddling in the affairs of others. It is the ideology of the fidget

Spe Salvi: Further Comments

Fr. Juan R. Vélez in Zenit has interesting comments on Spe Salvi. In a short note, he writes:

"Father [Juan Pablo] Ledesma in Hope, an Encounter With Love manages to summarize well the salient points of this wonderful encyclical.

I would like to add that as expected, the Holy Father quotes often St. Augustine. In his reference to the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man, one can see an allusion to Augustine's City of God and the city of man.

The city of man does not respond to man's need for hope and for God. But as in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI emphasizes that man experiences God's love and salvation as a community. For this he refers to [Henri] De Lubac's Catholicisme.

As indicated in the article, the Pope warns us about so many false hopes.

For those of us in the United States and Western Europe, it is helpful to be reminded of the false hope that is the result of faith in progress understood in terms of science.

Lastly I wonder if by "recent theologians" who speak of purification as through fire by the encounter with Christ at the moment of death the Pope also has in mind John Henry Newman (1801-1890) who wrote about this in The Dream of Gerontius. Newman was following in the footsteps of St. Catherine of Genoa.

With this explanation about the searing power of God's love the Holy Father gives us a profound insight into personal judgment and purgatory understood as a transformation of love."

Advent: the re-uniting with the Prodigal Son

Mary McCleary
Prodigal Son, 1996
Mixed Media Collage on paper, 60 x 83 x 5 in.
Collection of Ellen Tuchman and Harry Orenstein, Dallas, Texas

In Mary McCleary's retelling of Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, the feast that celebrates the prodigal's return becomes a Texas-style family barbeque.

Seventeen figures fill the large image.

A couple dances as a man plays the fiddle. Women bring platters of fruit and pour lemonade. One young boy takes a forbidden sip of beer.

The father, a middle-aged rancher with an ample belly, looks lovingly at his newly returned son, decked out for the occasion in a pink sequined cowboy shirt.

The disconsolate elder son looks on from the background.

Unlike some modern religious art, it does not descend into kitsch

Advent: Towards the Birth of Christ

Natalia Goncharova [June 4, 1881 - October 17, 1962]
The Birth of Christ.1910.
Watercolor on paper, 23.9x29.8 cm.
Private collection, Moscow.

Goncharova was a prominent Russian avant-garde artist (Cubo-Futurism), painter and costume designer.

Her great-aunt was Natalia Pushkina, wife of the poet Alexander Pushkin

She was one of the main progenitors of the pre-Revolution Russian avant-garde

She moved to Paris in 1921 where she designed a number of stage sets of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

She became a French citizen in 1939.

In 1962 she died in Paris

St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne

Ernest-Ange Duez 1843-1896
Saint Cuthbert 1879
Oil on Canvas
334, x 676 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
[Central panel in a triptych]

St Cuthbert is being fed by an eagle.

St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (c. 634–20 March 687) was an Anglo-Saxon monk and bishop in the Kingdom of Northumbria.He became one of the most important medieval saints of England, with widespread recognition in the places he had been in Scotland.

In 676 he adopted the solitary life and retired to a cave. After a time he settled on one of the Farne Islands, south of Lindisfarne, and gave himself more and more to austerities

While on the Farne Islands, he instituted special laws to protect the Eider ducks and other seabirds nesting on the islands

In 684, Cuthbert was elected bishop of Lindisfarne, at a synod at Twyford but was reluctant to leave his retirement and take up his charge. After Christmas, 686, however, he returned to his cell on Inner Farne Island (two miles from Bamburgh, Northumberland), which was where he eventually died.

He was buried at Lindisfarne but eventually the body was transferred to Durham.


Duez was a friend of John Sargent who painted his portrait (now in New Jersey).

Duez was most famous for his landscapes and would never stop painting those, however, he would also have periods where he would concentrated on portraiture or on genre paintings.

Martyrs in the Catacombs

Jules Eugène Lepneveu 1819 -1898
Les martyrs aux catacombes 1855
Oil on Canvas
170, x 336 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris