The Blessed Virgin Mary

The Blessed Virgin Mary

Paul Woodroffe

Photomechanical reproduction of pen and ink drawing.

4½ x 3 inches

The Little Flowers of St. Francis , facing p. 128.

Another of the book’s several encounters with the divine, this illustration places the figures in a woody bower which is shown with Pre-Raphaelite exactitude. As so often in Woodroffe’s graphic design, the intense particularization of details gives it the dazzling effect of many Pre-Raphaelite paintings – as if the eye is overloaded with data. The endless creativity of the Godhead is given metaphorical expression in the plenty of nature, which becomes a storehouse of matter, or what some critics have called the ‘thingness’ of this notion of the phenomenal world.

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Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.

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