By JAMES MONTI
Advent, as Pope St. John Paul II observed, is a liturgical journey that we make in the company of Our Lady. Our Advent each year lasts on average about three and a half weeks, but hers, the very first, lasted nine months, beginning with the Angel Gabriel’s visit to her. In the eternal Providence of God, how very fitting it is that the annual commemoration of the Blessed Virgin’s own dawn of existence, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, should come in the heart of Advent. Here in the United States as in Mexico the Marian motif of Advent is further amplified by the December 12 Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
One could say that the New Testament begins with the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. While this mystery is not explicitly mentioned in the Scriptures, it hangs like the predawn light over the eastern horizon that awaits the sunrise of the Incarnation.
As an event that took place hidden from human eyes within the body of Our Lady’s mother St. Anne, and as a doctrine affirming the Blessed Virgin’s total preservation from a stain that is corporeally invisible — the stain of original sin — it might seem that this subject would not lend itself readily to depiction in religious art. Yet over the centuries the Immaculate Conception has inspired an almost countless range of spectacular paintings.
The Spanish master Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) excelled in this, setting the Immaculate Conception to canvas many times. The particular manner of depicting this mystery that emerged in Spain, reaching its zenith in the 17th century, came to be known by a distinctive name, the Purisima, “the Most Pure One,” a visual representation of Mary’s total sinlessness.
It had its roots in the ancient tradition of applying to the Blessed Virgin Old Testament passages about the beauty of the bride in the Song of Solomon, the splendor of the King’s bride in Psalm 45, and the loveliness of wisdom personified as a woman in the Book of Wisdom (especially Wisdom 7:7-30). The scriptural verse “Tota pulchra es,” “You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you” (Song 4:7), was utilized by theologians to build their case for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and inspired a liturgical antiphon of the same name, traceable to the late tenth century:
“You are all beautiful, my beloved, and there is no blemish in thee; honey dripping from thy lips, milk and honey under thy tongue, the fragrance of thy ointments over all aromas; for now the winter has passed, the rain has gone away and departed, the flowers have appeared, the flourishing vines have given forth their odor, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land; arise, make haste, my beloved; come from Libanus, come, you shall be crowned.”
Artists for their part gave visual expression to this theological perception of Mary by seeking to depict her as the most beautiful woman ever to have walked the face of the Earth. In several of his paintings of the Blessed Virgin, the Netherlandish master Jan van Eyck (+1441) incorporated an inscription of his own adapted from the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 7:29): “She is more beautiful than the sun, above all the order of the stars; being compared with the light, she is found before it.”
It was around the year 1500 that a unique manner of portraying the Immaculate Conception in art emerged in Spain based upon these biblical associations, the “Virgin tota pulchra,” the “Virgin All Beautiful,” in which Our Lady appears by herself with shoulder-length unbound hair — a symbol of her virginity — her hands joined in prayer, with symbols of her taken from the Old Testament and the Marian litanies surrounding her.
By the 17th century the New Testament imagery of “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” from the Book of Revelation (Rev. 12:1) had been incorporated in these depictions of the Immaculate Conception, with a new name attached to them — the Purisima.
Such depictions of the Immaculate Conception, while differing in details, all follow the pattern of portraying their subject as a young woman of about twelve or older. There is in this a powerful pro-life message, for by depicting Mary as essentially full-grown to symbolize the very moment when she began her life in the womb of her mother, these images affirm that our identity as fully human persons begins at the moment of conception. Even though the body at this stage of human life is only beginning the development of its organs and other parts, the soul we receive then is fully formed.
Among the very finest of the Purisima depictions of Our Lady is one painted about 1645 by Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664), preserved at present in the diocesan museum of the Spanish cathedral of Siguenza. Zurbaran portrays the Blessed Virgin as a maiden of unutterable beauty, the unbound tresses of her golden brown hair gracefully cascading down upon her shoulders. Her gently bowed head attests her humble submission to God, and the gravitas, the intense seriousness in her countenance, testifies that she understands the seriousness of her mission. Beyond the twelve stars encircling her head the sky around about her is suffused in vivid gold, representing the light of Heaven and alluding to God’s eternal plan of creating her.
Symbols drawn from the Old Testament as foreshadowings of the Blessed Virgin, some corresponding to images from the Litany of Loretto, appear to her left and right and in the landscape below — Jacob’s ladder and the gate of Heaven from the Book of Genesis (Gen. 28:12,17), the Tower of David, the enclosed garden, the sealed fountain and the “well of living water” from the Song of Solomon (Song 4:4,12,15), the cedar of Lebanon, the cypress on Mount Hermon, the palm tree of Engeddi and the morning star from the Book of Sirach (Sirach 24:13-14; 50:6), and the unspotted mirror from the Book of Wisdom (7:26).
Mary stands upon a crescent moon with its points turned downward, the illuminated side facing upward to receive the light of the sun just as Mary is illuminated by her divine Son. She wears at her neck a golden brooch studded with jewels that form the initials of the Angelic Salutation. The Blessed Virgin’s white dress represents her spotless innocence, her total sinlessness, unsullied by original sin. Her dress shimmers with the brightness of reflected sunlight, the light of her divine Son, whom she reflects so perfectly.
Our Lady stands totally erect in a manner that resembles a column. This and the luminosity of her gown evoke another Old Testament image, the columna nubis, the “pillar of cloud” that in the Book of Exodus leads the Israelites by day, and turning fiery after dark, by night (Exodus 13:21-22; 14:19, 24; 33:9-10). In the Book of Sirach wisdom speaks of being enthroned “in a pillar of cloud” (Sirach 24:4).
The biblical pillar of cloud has its counterparts in Nature, from which artists like Zurbaran could have drawn their inspiration, for two clouds known to science as the towering cumulus and the cumulonimbus (the thundercloud) can (especially in the tropics) billow upward into the sky for miles with almost perfect verticality, reflecting the sunlight with a dazzlingly white brilliance.
Zurbaran’s painting and others like it also evoke the imagery of a liturgical antiphon dating back to the late ninth century and adapted from the Song of Solomon (Song 6:3): “Who is this, who ascends like the dawn arising? Beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun, fearsome as an army set in array.” This antiphon has in more recent times come to be known as the “Catena legionis,” for it is the spiritual battle cry of the Legion of Mary, serving as one of the hallmark prayers of this lay apostolate.
The reference to Our Lady here as being “fearsome as an army set in array,” alluded to by the gravity of Mary’s face in the Zurbaran painting, reminds us that both as Mother of the Redeemer and as the peerless human paragon of sinless purity and virginal innocence she is the implacable foe of Hell. Satan in his hideous pride is infuriated to no end that he has been vanquished by a girl.
And he has reason to fear Mary — even the slightest rustle of Our Lady’s skirt is enough to send him bolting for the exit door. Anyone who has invoked the fair name of Mary in times of temptation will know this to be so.
One of the Church’s greatest Marian theologians, St. Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), observed: “. . . .Mary has come and since her Immaculate Conception has always been victorious over the devil; with her virginal foot she crushes the head of hell’s monster, remaining ever the Immaculate, all beautiful and all holy” (Fr. Peter D. Fehlner, FI, tr., Roman Conferences of St. Maximilian Kolbe, Academy of the Immaculate, 2004, p. 7).
With Mary at our side, may the fragrance of her purity help us to keep that resolution we make in the confessional “to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
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