01 Work, RELIGIOUS ART - CONTEMPORARY Interpretation of the Bible! With Footnotes - 27

Dino Valls

PASSIO, The Passion, c. 1993

Egg tempera and oil / wood

72 x 58 cm.

Private collection

I am not sure what Dino Valls intended by calling his painting "PASSIO", but it reminds me of the  Old Masters interpretations of Saints, and the olive branch shown would symbolize the description given the passion of Saint Olivia. I hope that this does not prejudice this beautiful work!

Saint Olivia of Palermo (Palermo, 448 – Tunis, 10 June 463) is a Christian virgin-martyr who was venerated as a local patron saint of Palermo, Sicily in the Middle Ages.

Her feast day is on June 10, and she is represented as a young woman with olive branches surrounding her.

Olivia was the beautiful daughter of a noble Sicilian family. From her early years she devoted herself to the Lord while declining honors and riches, and loved to give charity to the poor. In 454 AD Genseric, king of the Vandals, conquered Sicily and occupied Palermo, martyring many Christians. When she was thirteen Olivia began to comfort the prisoners and urged the Christians to remain steadfast in their faith. The Vandals were impressed by the strength of her spirit, seeing that nothing could prevail against her faith, and so in deference to her noble house, they sent her to Tunis where the governor would attempt to overcome her constancy.

In Tunis Olivia worked miracles and began to convert the pagans. The governor therefore ordered that she be relegated to a lonely place as a hermitess, where there were wild animals, hoping that the beasts would devour her or that she would die of hunger. However the wild animals lived peacefully around her. One day some men from Tunis who were hunting found her, and impressed by her beauty tried to abuse her; but Olivia converted them too with the word of the Lord and they were baptized. 

After miraculously curing many of the sick and suffering in the region, Olivia converted many pagans to the Christian faith. When the governor heard about these things he had her arrested and imprisoned in the city in an attempt to make her apostatize. She was scourged and she was stripped and submerged into a cauldron of boiling oil, but these tortures did not cause her any harm, nor did they make her renounce her faith. Finally she was beheaded on June 10 of the year 463. More on Saint Olivia

Dino Valls is a Spanish painter born in 1959 in Zaragoza. Since 1988, he has lived and worked in Madrid.

Building on a childhood passion for drawing, Valls taught himself to paint in oils beginning in 1975. After completing his degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1982, Valls devoted himself full-time to the profession of painting.

As one of the Spanish representatives of the vanguard of figurative art, Valls' work displays the strong influence of past masters and their studies of the human being. In the early '90s, Valls began studying the use of egg tempera, adapting and customizing the techniques of Italian and Flemish masters from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries to create new works in combinations of tempera and oil. His paintings elaborate and expand upon the methods of past masters, employing formal figurative techniques as the medium through which to explore the human psyche in a conceptual framework laden with profound psychological weight and symbolism.

Valls has participated in important international exhibitions of contemporary art, and has held numerous showings in Europe and the United States. More on Dino Valls

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01 Work, RELIGIOUS ART - Interpretation of the bible, With Footnotes - 153

Master of the Female Half-Lengths

VIRGIN AND CHILD IN A LANDSCAPE, TOGETHER WITH TWO WINGS DEPICTING MALE AND FEMALE DONORS AND THEIR CHILDREN WITH SAINTS SEBASTIAN AND GERTRUDE OF NIVELLES

Oil on panel

central panel: 68 x 41.5 cm.; 26 3/4  x 16 1/4  in.

wings, each: 72 x 19 cm.; 28 1/4  x 7 1/2  in.

Private collection

The Master of the Female Half-Lengths was a painter, or likely a group of painters of a workshop, active in the sixteenth century. The name was given in the 19th century to identify the maker or makers of a body of work consisting of 67 paintings to which since 40 more have been added.

The works were apparently the product of a large workshop that specialized in small-scale panels depicting aristocratic young ladies at half-length. The ladies are engaging in various activities such as reading, writing, or playing musical instruments and are typically placed in a wood-panelled interior or against a neutral background. Some of the women are represented with an ointment jar, the attribute of Mary Magdalene. To the Master are also attributed a few paintings of mythological subjects and copies of standardized compositions such as the Crucifixion, the Deposition, the Virgin of Sorrows, St Jerome and Lucretia.

There is no agreement on the Master’s identity and the place and period of his activity. Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen and the French court have been proposed for the location of his workshop. Estimates for his period of activity vary from the early to the late 16th century. More on The Master of the Female Half-Lengths

Master of the Female Half-Lengths

THE TWO WINGS DEPICTING MALE AND FEMALE DONORS AND THEIR CHILDREN WITH SAINTS SEBASTIAN AND GERTRUDE OF NIVELLES

oil on panel

central panel: 68 x 41.5 cm.; 26 3/4  x 16 1/4  in.

wings, each: 72 x 19 cm.; 28 1/4  x 7 1/2  in.

Private collection

Saint Sebastian (died c. 288 AD) was an early Christian saint and martyr. Sebastian had prudently concealed his faith, but in 286 was detected. Diocletian reproached him for his betrayal, and he commanded him to be led to a field and there to be bound to a stake so that archers from Mauritania would shoot arrows at him. "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks, and thus left him there for dead." Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him.

Sebastian later stood by a staircase where the emperor was to pass and harangued Diocletian for his cruelties against Christians. This freedom of speech, and from a person whom he supposed to have been dead, greatly astonished the emperor; but, recovering from his surprise, he gave orders for his being seized and beat to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer. A pious lady, called Lucina, admonished by the martyr in a vision, got it privately removed, and buried it in the catacombs at the entrance of the cemetery of Calixtus, where now stands the Basilica of St. Sebastian. More St. Sebastian

SAINT GERTRUDE OF NIVELLES was born at Landen, Belgium in 626 and died at Nivelles, 659. Both her parents, Pepin of Landen and Itta were held to be holy by those who knew them; her sister Begga is numbered among the Saints. On her husband's death in 640, Itta founded a Benedictine monastery at Nivelles, which is near Brussels, and appointed Gertrude its abbess when she reached twenty, tending to her responsibilities well, with her mother's assistance, and following her in giving encouragement and help to monks, particularly Irish ones, to do missionary work in the locale. 

She was known for her hospitality to pilgrims and her aid to missionary monks from Ireland as we indicated above: She gave land to one monk so that he could build a monastery at Fosse. By her early thirties Gertrude had become so weakened by the austerity of abstaining from food and sleep that she had to resign her office, and spent the rest of her days studying Scripture and doing penance. 

Devotion to St. Gertrude became widely spread in the Lowlands and neighboring countries.

Another patronage is to travelers on the high seas. It is held that one sailor, suffering misfortune while under sail, prayed to the Saint and was delivered safely. More on Saint Gertrude

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01 Photograph, Tales of Mermaids, with Footnotes, 9

Zena Holloway, United Kingdom

Rolling in the Deep, c. 2005

Photography

16.5 W x 23.2 H x 0 in

Private collection

"Far, far from land, where the waters are as blue as the petals of the cornflower and as clear as glass, there, where no anchor can reach the bottom, live the mer-people." 
~ The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen

Zena Holloway (born 1973 in Bahrain) is an underwater photographic artist living in London. Her work deviates from the stereotypical imagery associated with underwater photography. For Holloway the underwater landscape serves as a backdrop, using cinematic drama and painterly aesthetics, she directs her models along themes of universal human experiences: love, loss, intimacy and romance. Her recent work Flowers for Jeju : The Last Mermaids focuses on the historical and spiritual tradition of the Haenyeo of South Korea. Alongside her dedication to long-term personal projects, she is a regular contributor to editorial, for publications such as The Sunday Times Magazine, Paris Match and the FT. Her work is exhibited globally and she has been the recipient of many international photographic and film awards. More on Zena Holloway

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01 Works RELIGIOUS ART - Interpretation of the bible, With Footnotes - 154

John William Waterhouse, (1849–1917

Saint Cecilia, c. 1895

Oil on canvas

Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Saint Cecilia is the patroness of musicians. It is written that as the musicians played at her wedding she "sang in her heart to the Lord". She is one of seven women, excluding the Blessed Virgin, commemorated by name in the Canon of the Mass.

According to the story, despite her vow of virginity, she was forced by her parents to marry a nobleman named Valerian. During the wedding, Cecilia sat apart singing to God in her heart, and for that she was later declared the saint of musicians. When the time came for her marriage to be consummated, Cecilia told Valerian that she had an angel of the Lord watching over her who would punish him if he dared to violate her virginity but who would love him if he could respect her maidenhood. When Valerian asked to see the angel, Cecilia replied that he would see the angel if he would go to the third milestone on the Via Appia (the Appian Way) and be baptized by Pope Urbanus.] After his baptism, he found an angel standing by the side of Cecilia, and crowning her with a chaplet of roses and lilies.

The martyrdom of Cecilia is said to have followed that of Valerian and his brother by the prefect Turcius Almachius. The legend about Cecilia’s death says that after being struck three times on the neck with a sword, she lived for three days, and asked the pope to convert her home into a church. More on Saint Cecilia

John William Waterhouse (April 6, 1849 – February 10, 1917) was an English painter known for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He worked several decades after the breakup of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had seen its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to his sobriquet "the modern Pre-Raphaelite". Borrowing stylistic influences not only from the earlier Pre-Raphaelites but also from his contemporaries, the Impressionists, his artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

Born in Italy to English parents who were both painters, he later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Later on in his career he came to embrace the Pre-Raphaelite style of painting despite the fact that it had gone out of fashion in the British art scene several decades before. More on John William Waterhouse

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