Solemnity of the Birth St. John the Baptist

Child Jesus with infant John the Baptist

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Nivard ...
To: Donald ...
Sent: Monday, 24 June 2013, 17:11
Subject: Happy Day

Dear Donald,

Happy Congrats on the fifty-fourth Anniversary of Ordination.

May the Lord continue to bless you in our wonderful vocation.

Love        Nivard 

+ + + 

12th Week Ord Time
Monday 24th  
On the Solemnity of the Birthday of St. John the Baptist, it is the 54th anniversary of Ordination of Priesthood. The 1959 souvenir cards long gone. The motto words of Psalm 26(27):4, remain at heart.
There is one thing I ask of the Lord
for this I long,
to live in the house of the Lord,
all the days of my life,
in the savour of the sweetness of the Lord,
to behold his temple. [Ps. 26:4, Grail 1963]

http://www.athanasius.com/psalms/psalms1.html#27 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The most interesting subject for the Birthday of St. John of the Baptist in the Leonardo Charcoal Cartoon for the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John (Burlington House, London).

COLORPLATE 33

Painted 1499-1501

BURLINGTON HOUSE CARTOON (VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. ANNE), detail

Charcoal heightened with white on brown paper

National Gallery, London

The face of the Virgin in the Burlington House Cartoon accords with the type Leonardo had established seventeen years before in the Virgin of the Madonna of the Rocks in the Louvre (colour plate 18), yet it betrays the deep changes these long years had wrought in his art and that the other Madonna of the Rocks, the London version, first began to reveal. Something of that sweet harmony and well-being have survived, but now the face is that of a mature woman and is suffused with feelings and compassion that arc the direct result of an emotional and human concern with the actions of the children. Realistic behaviour has replaced elusive ethereality. The Virgin's head is voluminous and its structure more systematically defined than in Leonardo's earlier work. Moreover, the slight incline of the head is no longer a convention, as it was in the Madonna of the Rocks, but the result of a conscious movement. However, she still has the force of an idealized and universal presence.

The contrast between St. Anne's strange face and the pleasantly candid one of the Virgin could not be more striking. The older woman's narrow, deep set eyes, her deliberately compressed lips, and her curious mannered smile give the face an animation and a seer-like wisdom befitting one who attempts to communicate to a contented Virgin the dreadful knowledge of her son's future sacrifice. Leonardo's persistent search into the realm of the inner mind has given him access to emotions and psychological states that have now a mystical substance, which acts to expand upon and enrich the mere human condition.

Professor Wasserman

Leonardo