Happy Birthday, Estelanui!

[whiteling]

*dashes in just in time to wish Estelanui a happy birthday*

Happy Birthday, dear Francesca! :-)

I hope you are having an enjoyable day full of pleasant happenings. *hugs*

And look - those lovely ladies have come, bearing gifts for you:

Comments

Pt. 1 (sorry, it got really long...)

[mechtild]

Estelanui, happy birthday, if well after the fact. I loved that your birthday inspired this post by Whiteling. (This is for you to read, too, Whiteling.)

I am butting in to say that I did read 'The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future' by Riane Eisler, which you recommended in a post in early January.

Whiteling's post about the Matronae still extant in Germany (and under a minster!) brought its thesis all back to me, about the pre-male-dominated religion and social structure of what became Europe, back in the Neolithic age. I loved her discussion of how it kept re-emerging throughout Western history, including how it kept cropping up in the Church, mostly unnoted in a conscious way (or it would have been trounced).

You mentioned that while in the church arose the cult of the Madonna, the Matronae seemed unrepresented. I know there are supposed to be three, but perhaps some of the religious feeling suppressed when the three were suppressed came out in the cult of St. Anne and the Virgin as a girl? Then you always see and older woman and a young woman or girl, widely venerated as a pair and depicted in painting after painting, as if they were themselves agents and revealers of the divine. And often Jesus is included as a baby. I even found a site that calls that composition, iconographically, a "Triple Anne":
http://www.museothyssen.org/thyssen_ing/coleccion/obras_ficha_texto1010.html

Anne, the girl Virgin and the infant Christ representing the three ages. If Jesus himself were thought of as a revealer of a non-patriarchal God, he could count as one of the three feminine divine figures. It's a stretch, but a thoughtfully made one, lol.

Some show St. Anne standing to one side, the Virgin holding the infant. But some have them on each other's laps.

Here's the Leonardo one that's so famous: hanging on to a toddler Jesus, the Virgin, a grown woman, is sitting on her mother Anne's lap. I love the way each is looking at her child with such love.
http://www.myvietnamart.com/files/1995776/uploaded/DaVin009.jpg

Here's a very large version of a preliminary sketch by Da Vinci (click to open further), also a favourite and also a multi-lap "Triple Anne", but with child-John the Baptist included:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Leonardo_-_St._Anne_cartoon-alternative-downsampled.jpg

Here's another one of the Virgin holding Jesus, the both of them on St. Anne's lap, in a much more iconic-like composition by Masolino and Masaccio:
http://www.aiwaz.net/uploads/gallery/madonna-and-child-with-saint-anne-1695-mid.jpg

Here's a lap composition from Castile, 16th cent. (unknown sculptor):
http://museocerralbo.mcu.es/ing/coleccion/art/fotos/ESCULTURA/178-233_ESC02_TripleSantaAn.jpg

The piece de resistance is this 16th cent. sculpture, not a Triple Anne, and not a multi-lap composition, but one that shows Anne and the Virgin seated side by side (Jesus on Mary's lap), with "Emerentia", the mother of Anne, standing above and behind them. It's credited to The Urban Master of Hildesheim:
http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/december2001/emerentia.jpg

(cont'd)