Ad Imaginem Dei: July 2024

Friday, July 12, 2024

Glorious Saint Anne – The Iconography of Saint Anne

Masaccio, Madonna and Child with Saint Anne
Italian, 1424
Florence, Uffizi Gallery

The course of the year has come round, once again, to the middle of July and the start of the period in which the Church turns to honor Saint Anne and her husband, Saint Joachim, parents of the Virgin Mary and grandparents of Jesus. As it has every July since 1892, my home parish in New York will be honoring St. Anne during the nine day novena and feast day, from July 17th to July 26th. The schedule is shown below.

During the ten-day period in 2011, I posted a series of essays on the iconography of Saint Anne. The list of topics is shown below. I refer readers to them. I've updated some with additional images, as I've found them during the past year.

1. Introduction, The Background of Joachim and Anne plus the Annunciation of Mary's Birth
2. The Meeting of Anne and Joachim at the Golden Gate
3. The Birth of Mary
4. The Presentation of Mary in the Temple
5. Saint Anne as Teacher (The Education of the Virgin Mary)
6. Anne, Root of the Tree of Salvation (the Anna selbdritt image)
7. Saint Anne, Grandmother
8. Saint Anne, Matriarch of the Holy Kindred
9. Saint Anne in the Communion of Saints
10. Saint Anne, Patron and Intercessor

I have also published additional images of Saint Anne in annual supplements. To see these click on the year or title:
Saint Anne at the Met
2014
2016
2017
2018
2019

2020

2022

Please note that there was no update for 2023. An unfortunate computer accident wiped out all the data I had collected during that year and I was unable to produce an update. As of the date of this posting I am still working on the update for 2024. I expect to publish it before the July 26th feast day.

In the meantime, you may want to join in the daily prayer to Saint Anne, recited during each day of the novena.

Novena Prayer to Saint Anne
"O glorious Saint Ann, you are filled with compassion for those who invoke you and with love for those who suffer! Heavily burdened with the weight of my troubles, I cast myself at your feet and humbly beg of you to take the present intention which I recommend to you in your special care.

Please recommend it to your daughter, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and place it before the throne of Jesus, so that He may bring it to a happy issue. Continue to intercede for me until my request is granted. But, above all, obtain for me the grace one day to see my God face to face, and with you and Mary and all the saints to praise and bless Him for all eternity. Amen."

Luca Vescia, Saint Anne and Mary
Italian, 1911
New York, Saint Jean Baptiste Church,
Shrine of Saint Anne

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Calming the Storm

Jesus Calming the Storm

From a Book of Hours

French (Paris), c. 1430-1435

New York, Pierpont Morgan Library,

MS M 359, fol. 62r

"He got into a boat and his disciples followed him.

Suddenly a violent storm came up on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by waves; but he was asleep.

They came and woke him, saying, "Lord, save us! We are perishing!"

He said to them, "Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?" Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm.

The men were amazed and said, "What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?"

(Matthew 8:23-27)

Gospel Reading for Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Ironically but appropriately, the Gospel reading for Tuesday of the Thirteenth week of Ordinary Time in Cycle II happens to fall this year on a day on which the Caribbean and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico are experiencing or preparing to experience the strongest hurricane to ever hit those waters this early in the hurricane season. This Gospel excerpt depicts the events of a threatening storm on the Sea of Galilee that was calmed by a word from Jesus, an event so strange that the disciples asked themselves what kind of man they were associating with.

In Christian tradition there is another implication for this passage. A long standing way of thinking about the Church (with a big C) is to use the metaphor of a ship. In fact, the word which describes the central portion of a church building, nave, derives from the Latin for ship navis, the same word from which we get the words "navy" and "naval". The Church moves through the troubled waters of this world, carrying its precious cargo of souls, as a ship carries the souls on board through the watery oceans and seas of the planet. In both cases, Christ is the surest captain, calming the forces that can wound the immortal in us in the same way that he calmed the waters of the storm-ridden Sea of Galilee.

Consequently, the subject has been a popular one for artists, although not one of the most popular. Yet it does have a long history.

Jesus Asleep and Jesus Awake

One of the most interesting elements of the Gospel text is the fact that, when the storm begins, Jesus is asleep. The panicked disciples have to wake him up to plead for help.

In the medieval period, which is where the earliest images I was able to find so far come from, the artists desired to include all the details in the way in which they depicted the story. So, in virtually all of the images from the tenth through the twelfth centuries, every picture includes Jesus in the two states: asleep and awake. Usually he is seen asleep at one end of the boat and awake at the opposite end.

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
German, c. 980
Oberzell, Church of Saint George

If you enlarge this image and look closely you will see that the unique halo with the cross that surrounds the head of Jesus appears twice. He can be seen asleep at the left side of the boat and awake at the front of the right side grouping.

Jesus Calming the Storm
From the Gospels of Otto III
German (Reichenau), c. 1000
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
MS Clm 4453, fol. 103v

Jesus Cures a Leper and Calms the Storm
From the Codex Aureus of Echternach
German (Reichenau), c. 1030
Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum
MS Hs. 156142, fol. 54r

Jesus Calming the Storm
From the Pictorial Bible of the Abbey of Saint Bertin
French (Saint-Omer), 1190-1200
The Hague, Koninklijk Bibliotheek
MS 76 F 5, fol. 14r

The Sleeping Jesus

From about the middle of the twelfth century, however, artists began to show only one depiction of Jesus per picture. Consequently, they began to show him either asleep or awake. Here are some sample of Jesus asleep.

Jesus Asleep in the Boat
From the Book of Pericopes of Saint Erentrud
Austrian (Salzburg), c. 1150
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
MS Clm 15903, fol. 25r

Jesus Asleep in the Boat
From the Munich Golden Psalter
English (Oxford), c. 1190-1210
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
MS Clm 835, fol. 72r

Jesus Asleep on the Sea of Galilee
From the Sermons of Maurice de Sully
Italian (Milan or Genoa), 1320-1330
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 187, fol. 7r

Jesus Asleep in the Boat
From a Speculum humanae salvationis
French (Paris), c. 1493-1494
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS VELINS-906, fol. 49v

This tradition of depicting a sleeping Jesus continued into the sixteenth-century and beyond.

Biagio Pupini, Christ Asleep in the Boat in Spite of the Storm
Italian, c. 1525-1530
Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

Mathis Gerung, Christ Asleep in the Boat
From the Ottheinrich Bible
German, c. 1530
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
MS Cgm 8010 (1), fol. 18r

Georg Pencz, Christ Asleep During the Storm
From The Story of Christ
German, c. 1534-1535
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Drawings and Prints

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee
Flemish, c. 1596
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

The seventeenth and eighteenth century artists seemed to prefer to depict Jesus as awake and in command, so there is a noticeable time gap between the image above and those below.

Eugene Delacroix, Christ in the Tempest
French, 1853
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

James Tissot, Jesus Asleep in the Storm
French, c. 1888-1896
New York, The Brooklyn Museum

Giorgio Di Chirico, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
Italian, 1914
Vatican City State, Collection of Modern Religious Art

Jesus Awake and In Command

The images of Jesus, awake and in command, span the entire period between the middle ages and the modern world.

Jesus Commands the Sea and Winds
From a Bible
Byzantine (Constantinople), Middle of the 13th Century
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Grec 54, fol. 124v

Claes Brouwer and Others, Jesus Commands the Storm
From a History Bible
Dutch (Utrecht), c. 1430
The Hague, Koninklijk Bibliotheek
MS KB 78 D 38 II, fol. 157r

Rembrandt, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee
Dutch, 1633
Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The younger Tiepolo, Giandomenico, gave us two thoughts about how a composition of Jesus awake and in command should look.

Giandomenico Tiepolo, Christ on the Sea of Galilee
Italian, 1760
Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

Auguste Jugelet, Christ Commanding the Storm at Sea
French, 1845
Tarbes, Musée Massey

Admittedly this is a little hard to see, but if you enlarge the picture you can see Christ in the front of the boat commanding the waves to be still.

Raymond Balze, Jesus Commanding the Storm to Still
French, Second Half of 19th Century
Beauvais, MUDO, Musée de l'Oise

James Tissot, Jesus Calming the Storm
French, c. 1888-1896
New York, The Brooklyn Museum

James Ensor, Christ Calming the Waters
Flemish, 1891
Ostend, Mu.ZEE

I hope that the coincidence of this reading, which millions of Catholics will hear, read and pray about, with the advance of Hurricane Beryl will bring God's protection and a speedy recovery to the peoples of the Windward Islands, the Caribbean, Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and to anyone else affected by the storm winds or waters in the Antilles or along the coast of South, Central and North America. And also, that Christ continues to safeguard his Church as it sails through the troubled waters of the world we live in.

Excerpts from the Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America, second typical edition © 2001, 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC. Used with permission. All rights reserved. No portion of this text may be reproduced by any means without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Uniquely among the monotheistic religions Christianity permits the use of images of God. Why? The answer lies in the Christian belief in the reality of the Incarnation. Since God has assumed human nature and form the Biblical prohibition against making images of God ceases to apply. As the second Council of Nicea declared in 787 "Following the divinely inspired teaching of our holy Fathers and the tradition of the Catholic Church (for we know that this tradition comes from the Holy Spirit who dwells in her) we rightly define with full certainty and correctness that, like the figure of the precious and life-giving cross, venerable and holy images of our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ, our inviolate Lady, the holy Mother of God, and the venerated angels, all the saints and the just, whether painted or made of mosaic or another suitable material, are to be exhibited in the holy churches of God, on sacred vessels and vestments, walls and panels, in houses and on streets."
(Council of Nicaea II: DS 600)

This decree of Nicea II was promulgated for the entire church, both Greek and Latin speaking, and was a response to the strongly held beliefs of the iconoclasts, who wished to suppress the use of images, which had convulsed the Byzantine Empire and the eastern churches for almost 100 years. In addition, St. John Damascene, last of the Greek Fathers and a staunch defender of images, had written in De imagine ("In Defense of Images") "Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, (Bar. 3.38) I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter." (St. John Damascene, De Imagine, Part I, 15-16, from Internet Medieival Sourcebook.)

The ways in which this imaging of the divine has been accomplished in the course of time is the subject of Christian iconography. To quote from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, iconography is "1: pictorial material relating to or illustrating a subject; 2: the traditional or conventional images or symbols associated with a subject and especially a religious or legendary subject; 3: the imagery or symbolism of a work of art, an artist, or a body of art".

The iconography of any subject develops and changes over time. Christian iconography develops and changes too, as reflection on the Gospels and Tradition develops over time and as the act of making art develops and changes as well. This is the background for this blog.

Ad Imaginem Dei

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