Black is the true color...

Of course the classic song begins Black, black, black is the color of my true love's hair... However, as my mother used to comment, the hairdresser's version of this ought rather to be Black is the true color of my love's hair.

And in this case, black is (apparently) the true color of the rosary I want to discuss.

I had quite a surprise the other day when I finally found a color version of a portrait of the Virgin and Child with rosary beads that I'd been looking for for years. One of the first historical rosaries I made was copied from this picture, which I found in Eithne Wilkins' The Rose-Garden Game.



Thanks to the magic of online searches, and the increasing efforts of museums to put their collections online, all I had to do was to look twice at the photo description, notice that the original painting is in the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, go to the Rijksmuseum website, and plug in the name of the painter. And voila! (At least, if you have an up-to-date web browser...)



Now it was quite a surprise to me to see the actual color of these beads. In the black and white photo, of course, they are black and white. But here's a slightly closer view, showing that the beads actually do appear to be black.



This is surprising because I have seen quite a few photos of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus with (highly anachronistic) rosary beads. In many cases, like this one, the infant is playing with the beads, as babies love to do. But at least ten out of the 15 paintings of this subject that I have in my file folder have red beads, presumably intended to represent coral. (There are a few more where I only have a black and white photo and can't tell what color they are.) I had begun to think that this might be a general rule.

I was further thrown off track in my interpretation of the black-and-white version by the existence of this very similar portrait, of the same subject and by the same painter, which is in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. These beads definitely are red.



The painter, by the way, is not one of the easier artists to find. His name is Ambrogio Stefani da Fossano (c. 1450-1523), but he is also known as Il Borgognone or Bergognone ("the Burgundian") and more often indexed that way.

Now the Rijksmuseum portrait is online at a fairly low resolution, and I'd want to double-check the original to see if the beads really are black, and also to determine the color of the gauds (marker beads). In the color version they appear to be red, but in the black and white version, they look lighter, and perhaps more like clear glass or rock crystal. Color distortion is certainly a possibility. But all the same, I was surprised to see the Infant Jesus with beads of such an unusual color.

Red may, indeed, be the dominant color of rosary beads in Virgin and Child portraits, and the Rijksmuseum portrait may be an exception. Red coral beads would make sense in a couple of ways: red coral was traditionally given to children as a good-luck charm and ward against the "evil eye," and it's also an expensive, luxury material suitable for exalted beings like the Virgin Mary.

So far I have only looked at a few hundred paintings, not the multiple thousands that an expert would have seen -- but then, I've only been researching this subject for about five years. I'll be interested to see whether the trends I think I see here continue when I've done more research.

More black beads to follow...

Christmas Blessings

As I did last year, I'm sharing a portrait of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus with a rosary. Actually, this time the rosary isn't in the hands of either of them, but rather, in the hands of all the women and girls in the group of donors kneeling at the foot of Mary's throne. (You can see it best if you look at the mother of the family in front.)



This is (somewhat awkwardly) titled "Die Madonna auf der Mondsichel im Hortus conclusus verehrt von einer Stifterfamilie" (Madonna on a Crescent in an Enclosed Garden with Donor Family). It was painted on an oakwood panel sometime in the 1450s, by an anonymous painter known as the "Master of 1456." The delightful blue, starry background was added later. I found it by looking for rosaries in all the color portraits of the Virgin Mary I could find at the Marburg Foto Archive (which is unfortunately not very well indexed).

I've had this picture on my computer "desktop" at work this month, and I like its serene quality. This has been an unusually busy Christmas season, though I expect to be back to something like normal after the Twelve Days of Christmas are done.

To wander a bit off topic -- I wish more people celebrated the Twelve Days, although I realize they are quite out of step in some ways with today's society. (Full disclosure: I'm probably somewhat biased, since my birthday happens to fall on one of the twelve. :)

In an agricultural society, I think the time before Christmas was generally quite busy with preparations for winter: gathering in the last of the harvest, cutting firewood, cooking and preserving and so forth. Correspondingly, the church's season of Advent before Christmas began as -- and to some extent, still is -- a season of preparation and fasting similar to Lent (though less intense).

Christmas Day, then, would therefore have been the beginning of all the winter's feasting, relaxing and generally celebrating. The Twelve Days of Christmas functioned more or less as a post-harvest vacation, once the preparations for winter were done.

In modern times, it seems that our (much less comprehensive) preparations begin right after Hallowe'en (in the USA at least), and the day after Thanksgiving, the celebrations begin. Before, rather than after, Christmas is now the season of parties, visits, church pageants and so forth. Radio stations play "all Christmas music" for a month beforehand.

And then suddenly on the 26th of December, it all disappears.

Well, it doesn't all disappear from my house.

Fortunately I have friends who celebrate Twelfth Night, and it's a tradition I treasure.

A Blessed Christmas to all!

I just have to show you this absolutely darling picture of the infant Jesus playing (anachronistically, of course) with beads. This is a detail from the Rottal votive panel -- a devotional painting commissioned by Jo:rg Rottal zu Talberg (Austria) in about 1505. I'd love to have a color picture of the entire thing for Christmas "wallpaper" on my computer: most of the saints are dressed in red and green, and the background is gold, tooled in fantastic curly leaf shapes.



A picture (black and white, unfortunately) of the entire painting is available here, and more details in color are here, here , here , here , and here .