Franciscan at Home

In 1583, nearing the end of a brilliant career as a painter, sixty-five-year-old Jacopo Robusti began work on The Annunciation, a scene of Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would be the mother of Jesus, the Son of God. Having grown up in his father’s dye business, Jacopo Robusti was better known as Tintoretto, the “little dyer,” from having drawn on the walls of the shop with pigments from his father’s dye pots. After absorbing the drawing style of Michelangelo and the color sense of Titian, he established a career in Venice. Tintoretto belonged to the group of Venetian painters known as Mannerists. Mannerism is a style characterized by exaggerations and unusual uses of color, light, and movement. As a mature painter, he also became known as Il Furioso—“The Furious”—for his energetic brushwork and powerful compositions, such as Paradise, an eighty-foot-long painting that is claimed to be the largest image ever painted on canvas. On a more moderate scale (13x17 feet!), Tintoretto’s The Annunciation is an example of how an artist can take what is conventionally seen as a quiet moment and turn it into a cosmic event. Tintoretto imaginatively, and correctly, transforms a well-known passage from Scripture into an exciting visual drama worthy of deep contemplation.

In the Gospel narrative, we are not given details of what Mary’s room in Nazareth was like, nor what Joseph was doing at the moment of the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel. Tintoretto gives us a significantly original point of view in which we see much more of the environment than expected. The side of the building facing us, the “fourth wall,” has been removed, which allows a broad expanse of space to be revealed. We get an “inside/outside” view of this moment and, at the same time, a vision of a needful world about to be transformed. Outside the house, the environment is dark, filled with broken boards in jumbled piles.

We can imagine this place as unkempt and disordered, a house and landscape that once was whole but now has fallen apart. This is a beautiful metaphor for the world as it was after the Fall of Adam and Eve. St. Joseph is in the distance working at some project alone in the darkness. The wall that separates the outside from the inside is itself a ruin of broken architecture. Mortar is peeling away from the brick wall. A piece of a classical column is topped with fragments of stones, bricks, and pottery—a haphazard stack of human designs that represent the failure of mankind to accomplish a true, beautiful, and lasting order. Mary’s room is tidy but also shows material poverty. The seat of the empty chair needs repair, and while the checkerboard of the floor depicts the order of classical perspective, it isshowing age and wear. But there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. Something is about to change—restoration and salvation are at hand. Christ will make all things new again.

When you ascend the hill that leads up onto Franciscan University of Steubenville’s campus and look across the Rosary Circle, a glittering mosaic will likely catch your eye. At first, you may only be able to make out a vague form inside a golden almond shape. As you get closer, you’ll see Our Lady, crowned as Queen of the Angels, standing within a mandorla formed by fiery seraphim. Her rose-colored mantle drapes around a representation of her holy womb. Inside, surrounded by concentric circles dotted with stars, Jesus holds a miniature Portiuncula and blesses the onlooker. The sun, moon, and stars are arranged in a pattern in the background, and upon close investigation, the familiar sights of campus can be recognized in the landscape stretched out below.

Our Lady of the Angels mosaic came to be after many COVID rosaries. During that tumultuous time, students, faculty, and staff often gathered in the Rosary Circle to pray together. It was then that Fr. Dave Pivonka, TOR, recognized the need for a central image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on campus. With the seventy-fifth jubilee approaching, a committee was formed to orchestrate the creation and installation of a mosaic on campus in honor of Our Lady. Our Lady of the Angels was chosen as the subject for the mosaic. This title has deep significance to the university because the Portiuncula Chapel, rebuilt by St. Francis, was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under this name. This article will walk you through the piece, unpacking how this image functions as visual theology. We will explore how two influences from our Catholic artistic tradition guided the work. The imagery and composition of the mosaic were inspired by the iconographic theme of “Our Lady of the Sign,” which shows Jesus Incarnate within the womb of the Blessed Virgin, and by St. Francis’ poem “Canticle of Creatures.”

“Mary does bring us closer to Christ; she does lead us to him provided that we live her mystery in Christ,” wrote St. John Paul II.[1]  Throughout the year, the Church offers the faithful countless spiritual paths to live in the mystery of Christ through the feasts and fasts, the seasons and rhythms of the liturgical year. Manifold dimensions of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’ Life, Passion, Death, and Resurrection unfold in time across the liturgical year. In this way, each day of the liturgical calendar is a renewed opportunity to enter into the life of grace and communion with the Blessed Trinity, who permeates time through the liturgical year to sanctify and transfigure human history.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes, “In celebrating this annual cycle of the mysteries of Christ, Holy Church honors the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, with a special love. She is inseparably linked with the saving work of her Son. In her the Church admires and exalts the most excellent fruit of redemption and joyfully contemplates, as in a faultless image, that which she herself desires and hopes wholly to be.”[2]

Contemplation of the mysteries of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary lead the faithful into contemplation of the mystery of Jesus Christ, her divine Son. A beautiful Netherlandish altarpiece, titled The Fifteen Mysteries and the Virgin of the Rosary, places before our eyes the life of Jesus Christ and his mother Mary so we might imitate her example and experience her spiritual motherhood of the Church. The masterpiece image also invites us to renewed devotion to the Marian prayer of the Rosary, as the Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary each year on the seventh of October.

The Mass of St. Gregory depicts a miracle in the life of Pope St. Gregory the Great, who died in Rome on March 12 of AD 604. According to tradition, he and others experienced the appearance of Jesus as the pope celebrated a particular Mass. It is considered a eucharistic miracle because of the circumstances surrounding the event.

We learn of this narrative through the stories of the saints collected and published by Jacobus de Voragine, a Dominican priest of the thirteenth century. The original title of his book was Readings from the Saints. But over time, the published work attained the title The Golden Legend. His collection was gathered from wide-ranging sources and traditions and underwent many revisions and additions after his lifetime. The stories are not canonical, so we are not obligated to believe the accuracy of the events depicted. But we find many of the narratives are part of our Catholic devotional love of the saints—they are tales that have been in the minds and hearts of Catholics for centuries. We can read of St. Helen finding the True Cross; the story of St. George and the Dragon; the lives of Mary’s mother and father, Anna and Joachim—it is a very long list. On the matter of belief in apocryphal texts, I prefer to offer Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s usual rejoinder to those who disbelieve in miracles: how do you know . . . were you there?

It is possible to find translations of early versions of The Golden Legend that are substantially the “original” form without the addition of later authors, which may give some confidence to those seeking Jacobus de Voragine’s personal contribution to the collection.

The translation of the original version of the St. Gregory narrative describes the story in this way:

A certain woman used to bring altar breads to Gregory every Sunday morning, and one Sunday when the time came for receiving Communion and he held out the Body of the Lord to her, saying: “May the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ benefit you unto life everlasting,” she laughed as if at a joke. He immediately drew back his hand from her mouth and laid the consecrated Host on the altar, and then, before the whole assembly, asked her why she had dared to laugh: “Because you called this bread, which I made with my own hands, the Body of the Lord.” Then Gregory, faced with the woman’s lack of belief, prostrated himself in prayer, and when he rose, he found the particle of bread changed into flesh in the shape of a finger. Seeing this, the woman recovered her faith. Then he prayed again, saw the flesh return to the form of bread, and he gave Communion to the woman.[1]

The sacristy of the Cathedral in Toledo, Spain, houses a painting made in the late sixteenth century by Domenikos Theotocopoulos, better known by his nickname, El Greco. In the center of the picture, we behold Christ wearing a brilliant red tunic. All the other figures—clad in gray, green, yellow, or blue—fall into subordinate places around Christ, as cool bodies gathered around a flame. A man in green takes hold of the red garment at its neckline to begin the divestment, the “expolio.” The brutal removal of the vesture, and its imminent sundering by the executioners, vividly reminds the clerics vesting in the sanctuary for Mass, and all of us, to be prepared for martyrdom.

One of the most famous Catholic paintings of history is the humble work of art titled The Angelus by Jean-Francois Millet. This painting might be considered unique in that it has been viewed as inspired fine art by some and purely sentimental illustration by others. What is in this image that stirs the aesthetic imagination for some and is dismissed by others as a simplistic work of religious nostalgia? Importantly, how does it incarnate the subject of prayer?

In 2020, the Shepherds of the Church gave us a treasure in the new Directory for Catechesis. Dr.

O Come, Let Us Adore Christ Our Lord!

“Adoration is the first attitude of man acknowledging that he is a creature before his Creator,” notes the Catechism (2628). In adoration we exalt the greatness of God and express gratitude to Jesus Christ for reconciling us to God in the mystery of his Paschal death and Resurrection.

Saint Luke’s Gospel tells us that the good news of God’s reconciling the world through his Son came first to simple shepherds in the midst of their ordinary work. As they kept watch over their flock at night the shepherds were the first to hear of the birth of Jesus, announced by a host of angelic choirs. At the astounding news, the shepherds’ humble work transformed into prayerful adoration as they left their fields to adore the newborn Jesus in the blessed company of Mary, his mother, and Joseph, his guardian and protector.

It is this Gospel moment that the talented Venetian painter, Giorgione, captures in this beautiful sixteenth-century scene of the adoration of the shepherds. While Florence was the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, the arts flourished equally in the city of Venice. Of particular interest to Venetian artists was the beauty of the natural world. So they painted Gospel scenes set in vibrant landscapes of green meadows, rocky hills, and winding streams. In his remarkable vision, Giorgione sets the Gospel scene of the adoration of the shepherds in a rich landscape of rolling fields contrasted against a rocky cave that comes alive with the good news of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.

When John Everett Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents was first displayed at the Royal Academy, the public response was near-universal revulsion.