4 de outubro de 2024

Portraits of Our Lady - Presentation

PORTRAITS OF OUR LADY

Presentation

"May the lives of Christians resemble the Most Holy Trinity as much as possible."

According to His Holiness Pius XII, this should have been the goal of the Marian Year, celebrating the first centenary of the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception: to reproduce in our lives the life of the Blessed Virgin; to copy her image within ourselves.

But it is not just during the Marian Year; every year of our lives, we should have this ideal. To imitate Her is to imitate Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

To facilitate this daily effort, I offer you these portraits of the Blessed Virgin. They are portraits of all the stages of her life, for she sanctified each one so that she could be imitated.

A portrait is the best substitute for the absence of a person. That is why those who wish to perpetuate their memory have their portraits made. That is why we carefully keep the portraits of loved ones who have already passed away. Since the invention of photography, portraits have multiplied. We take photos of the most important moments in life. Surely you keep many portraits of your mother at home: when she was a child, when she was young, in her wedding dress, and when she was already a mother, holding you as a baby in her arms. You cherish these portraits, look at them often with emotion, and show them to the people who visit you.

But aside from this earthly mother, you have another Mother who now lives in Heaven and who, twenty centuries ago, lived on Earth.

Don’t you want to know what this Mother of yours was like?

A little orphan who never knew his mother will ask those who lived with her, "What was my mother like?" And he listens tenderly to the good things they tell him about her, and might even think to himself, "I want to be like my mother."

Those who went to Fátima, to the site of the apparitions, asked the little children who saw the Blessed Virgin with great interest, "What is Our Lady like?" And you, don’t you want to know what your Mother in Heaven was like when she lived on Earth? Don’t you want to know what she is like now, living in glory, waiting for you to come live with Her?

The more you love your Mother, the more you will desire to know what she was like.

To satisfy these desires, I offer you this collection of portraits of your Mother. They span all the stages of her life. They reflect both her soul and her body.

To create them, I did not ask for colors from flowers, sunsets, and dawns, as poets do. I don’t want these to be idealized portraits; I want them to be reproductions as accurate as possible to reality. For this, I sought colors from theology and history.

The portrait must have an appropriate setting where the figure of the Blessed Virgin seems real. I won’t paint her standing above the Earth, between Heaven and Earth, surrounded by flashes of light and glory. I won’t place her in palaces of marble and jasper with stained glass windows. The figure of the Blessed Virgin will have the Palestinian setting in which her life unfolded.

It’s important to know how the Blessed Virgin, our Mother, was, and what she did while living on Earth. It’s not so important for us to know how she was idealized by Fra Angelico, Murillo, Ribera, and Raphael.

A good portrait not only reproduces the physical features but also allows the qualities of the soul to shine through.

When portraying the Blessed Virgin, we must not be satisfied with saying what she looked like physically and how she lived. We must guess how she thought and felt.

Where will I paint these portraits?

I won’t paint them on canvas, wood, or copper. I will paint them in you.

I want you to be a living portrait of the Blessed Virgin; for this reason, I won’t be content with telling you what your Mother was like, I will also tell you what you must do to resemble her. What you must avoid. What you must practice.

You are a woman, and beauty fascinates you. The Blessed Virgin is an ideal of beauty.

I hope I have enough skill to paint her portraits so vividly that you will exclaim in awe: “How beautiful is my Heavenly Mother! I can resemble Her. I want to resemble Her.”

Take the book, read it often. Let your heart and imagination supply what it lacks.

Meditate. Reproduce in yourself the beautiful features of the Blessed Virgin.

Seek to be a living portrait of your Mother.

For your life to resemble that of the Blessed Virgin as much as possible, you must work like a sculptor molding a bust.

The sculptor looks at the model and then at the block of wood. A glance at the model, a strike at the wood. At first, large chunks of wood are removed. As the features of the face are refined, the strokes become gentler, and the pieces of wood smaller.

It is in the final details that the artist shows his skill: in the eyes, the lips, the entire anatomy.

This is what you must do to reproduce the image of Mary in yourself.

One glance at the Virgin and a small strike at yourself, to remove what does not resemble the image of the Blessed Virgin.

Our great artists meditated deeply before molding statues and painting religious works. That is why their images have a supernatural quality, something not achieved by foreign artists, even though they may be more brilliant.

It is said that Juan de Juanes, before painting the Immaculate Conception, meditated on what the Blessed Virgin would have been like, prayed, and asked to be able to capture all the beauty he imagined on the canvas.

Finally, he took up his brushes and painted the wonderful image preserved in the Church of the Society of Jesus in Valencia: the Immaculate One clothed in the sun, standing on the moon, crowned by the Holy Trinity, and surrounded by symbols with which the Church invokes Mary: the mystical rose, the tower of David, the sealed fountain, the enclosed garden, and the spotless mirror.

It was as if the painter were saying: “All this and more is Mary, even though I could not express it all in her image.”

Murillo, the painter of the Immaculate Conception, meditated for many hours and many days on the beauty of the Virgin. He wanted to capture in his imagination all of Mary’s beauty as she came from the hands of God and find an image that could express that beauty.

With this goal, he meditated, prayed, and received Communion. He practiced, he hesitated, until one day he felt inspired. He took up his brushes and painted the Immaculate One with the face of an innocent girl, golden hair, hands clasped before her chest in a posture of prayer, a snowy tunic, and a celestial blue mantle floating in the air, as if stirred by a heavenly breeze, amidst clouds of light and supported by angels carrying palms, olive branches, roses, and lilies.

The painting was enchanting, but Murillo was not satisfied. He continued praying, receiving Communion, and trying again. Another day, he felt inspired once more and painted another picture. The Virgin was on clouds, gently rising as if she did not feel the weight of the earthly body that holds us down to the Earth. She had the moon under her feet; her hands were crossed over her chest as if guarding the treasure of grace that God had deposited in her heart, with her eyes fixed on Heaven, on God. She was so beautiful that the legion of heavenly spirits surrounding her like a crown let their palms and roses fall from their hands, awestruck by her beauty.

Pray, meditate, and receive Communion, so that you may reproduce the image of the Blessed Virgin in yourself with the greatest accuracy.

To assist you, I offer you this little book—Portraits of Our Lady—which we present to you in two series. In the first, you will see what the Blessed Virgin did so that you may do the same; hence, it bears the subtitle: Ecce Mater Tua—Behold your Mother.

The second tells how the Blessed Virgin was, what the palace was like that God built for himself on Earth; for this reason, it bears the subtitle: Domus Aurea—House of Gold.

Read, meditate, copy. Until what His Holiness Pius XII desires is fulfilled in you:

"In the same way that all mothers feel a sweet joy when they see in the faces of their children a special resemblance to their own features, so also our sweetest Mother Mary, when she looks at the children she received at the foot of the cross in place of her Son, desires nothing more and nothing pleases her more than to see the virtues of her soul reproduced in their thoughts, words, and actions."

Nenhum comentário:

Postar um comentário