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.
Click on image to enlarge it.
Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.