The Archangels Michael and Gabriel, hovering in the upper corners, hold the instruments of the Passion. St. Michael (in the left corner) holds the spear, the wine-soaked sponge, and the crown of thorns. St. Gabriel (in the right corner) holds the cross and the nails.
The intent of the artist was to portray the Child Jesus contemplating the vision of His future Passion. Frightened by the vision, he runs to his mother for consolation. The anguish He feels is shown by the loss of one of His sandals as he quickly flees into the arms of his Mother.
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Despite a forboding vision of suffering, the icon also conveys the triumph of Christ over sin and death, symbolized by the golden background as a sign of the glory of the resurrection. The royal crowns on the heads of Jesus and Mary also symbolize their triumph as the King of Kings with his Queen Mother.
Just as the Child Jesus fled into the arms of his Mother when he was frightened, so too do we flee into the arms of our Blessed Mother with child-like confidence whenever fear envelopes our hearts. Just as the Virgin Mother consoled and comforted her Divine Child, so too does she console and comfort us, her spiritual children, in our afflictions. We can always come to her in our time of need and receive her help.
To this day, the Church of St. Alphonsus in Rome displays the original icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. They are the guardians and promoters of the holy icon, the only religious order entrusted with the task of doing so with a venerated image of Our Lady.
The original picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is painted on a wood panel and is about seventeen by twenty-one inches. It is Byzantine in style and similar to many portraits of Our Lady with the infant Jesus found throughout Russia and the East. The manner of portraying Mary is called the Hodegetria, where Mary's hand points to her Son.
On either side are the Archangels Gabriel and Michael bearing the instruments of the Passion. The artist depicts the anguish of Christ as He looks upon the cross and His left sandal is falling off His foot as if He hurriedly ran back to the arms of His mother for her help and protection.
Mary's face is turned , not toward her Son, but to those who gaze upon the picture. The sufferings that await her Son are vividly portrayed and she looks at the viewer as a reminder of the great suffering that Christ had to endure to achieve the salvation of the world.
This miraculous picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was brought from Crete to Rome by a merchant around the year 1495. According to legend, he stole it from a church in Crete. Thereafter, he became mortally ill and before his death he asked a friend that the painting be placed in a church as a form of restitution.
Although the friend had promised to do so, his wife asked that the image remain in their home. Subsequently, Our Lady appeared to the youngest daughter of the family and asked that the image be brought to the Church of St. Matthew, "between the Basilicas of St. Mary Major and St.John Lateran," where it could be venerated by the faithful. To this young child, Our Lady also revealed herself as " Holy Mary of Perpetual Help."
On March 27, 1499, the picture was solemnly enthroned on the high altar in the Church of St. Matthew, under the protection of the Augustinian Fathers. It was venerated there for almost three centuries until 1798, until the French army seized Rome, took Pope Pius VI (1774-1799) into captivity and leveled thirty churches in Rome, including St. Matthew's. The image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was removed from the church before its destruction and kept in a private chapel of the Augustinians at St. Mary in Posterula, near the Tiber River.
In the year 1863, Fr. Francis Blosi, S.J. was preaching in the Church of the Gesu in Rome and related the history of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, with the hope that the image could be located and be placed in veneration for the faithful once gain. A member of the Redemptorist Order, Fr. Michael Marchi, had served Mass in the private Augustinian Chapel when he was a child and knew the whereabouts of the image.
When Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) heard the story, he decreed that the miraculous image be given to the Redemptorists to be venerated in their church of Saint Alfonso on the Via Merulana , located between the Basilicas of St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran. The Redemptorists had purchased this land in 1855 to build their Motherhouse and Church, which included the site on which St. Matthew's Church had stood.
The picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was exposed for public veneration above the high altar of the Church of Saint Alfonso on April 26, 1866 where it remains to this day. The holy image was solemnly crowned on June 23, 1867. Although it is not celebrated in the universal calendar of the church, the Redemptorist Order observes the Feast of our Lady of Perpetual Help each year on June 27.
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Shortly before his dementia grew too severe to travel, my grandfather came to visit me one last time. Already he was acting very different from his usual self, but at the time he was still able to share stories of his life and have some awareness of what was going on around him.
I lived in Washington, DC, then, so I took him and my grandmother to visit one of my favorite places in that city: the Catholic Information Center. I volunteered there at the time, helping out with events and manning the cash register.
In the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, baby Jesus is frightened and flees into her arms. Seeing God himself seek comfort from this holiest of women reminds us to do the same. This image inspires us to run to Mary for help, just as Christ did, in all the trials we face.
Tradition holds that, in this image, young Jesus is frightened because he sees a vision of his future Passion. Mary reassures the frightened child with her actions and her very presence.
Mary walks beside us when we carry our crosses too. She abides near us, offering her steady, gentle, supportive love. This image helps us keep this truth at the forefront of our minds, so we can be consoled by her presence as Christ was, both as a child and as a man.
The documented history of this wonder-working icon begins in the year 1495, when the image was highly reverenced in a church on the island of Crete. At that time it was already considered of great age, with some writers placing its origin at either the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It was afforded every measure of devotion because of the number of favors granted to those who prayed before it.
Our Blessed Lady seemed eager to make known the virtues of her image by way of a miracle that was performed during this procession. A man who had been paralyzed for some time was immediately cured when the image passed in procession near the house in which he lay.
Devotion to this wonder-working icon spread rapidly to the United States. IN 1870, when the Redemptorists were asked to establish a mission church in Roxbury, not far from Boston, they dedicated their small church to the Mother of Perpetual Help. They received from Rome the first copy of the portrait, which had been touched to the original. Since then more than 2,300 copies that had been similarly touched to the original have been sent to other houses of the Order.
The United States also takes credit for inaugurating the Tuesday night devotions to the Mother of Perpetual Help. Devotions that first took place at St. Alphonsus (Rock) Church in St. Louis, Missouri, on Tuesday nights, were quickly adopted by churches of the Order and by other churches, and took the form of a perpetual novena, a practice that is now observed worldwide.
The miraculous portrait is till enthroned on an altar in the Church of St. Alphonsus in Rome. The ruins of the Church of St. Matthew, where the image was reverenced for almost 300 years, are found on the grounds of the Redemptorist monastery.
Scholarship on photography is so abundant and varied today that discerning trends is no easy task. But perhaps photography itself can assist us. In particular, Our Lady of Perpetual Help (2008), one of a series of photographs by S. Billie Mandle of compartments for penitents in confessionals, may serve as a helpful touchstone. It has in common with much recent scholarship a set of paired concerns: structural division and exchange, materiality and trace, community and ritual, revelation and absence, sin and history. Reflection on these concerns in the light of Our Lady of Perpetual Help may stimulate new thoughts about the current state of photography scholarship.
Perhaps the primary challenge to scholarship on photography today is the division of the subject into two distinct but connected spaces. One is the space of things, where photographs are made of paper, glass, silver, dyes, and other materials, and where we handle them, hang them on walls, move them about, and put them in boxes. The other is the virtual space of our digital network of server farms and hard drives, where photographs have no substance or size and arrive suddenly when we beckon them to our glowing screens. Photographs pass from one space to the other through the prescribed channels of digitization or printing, or meet in hybrid contraptions, such as the digital picture frame.
In recent years, reference to visual representations on computer screens and to the phenomenal experiences they engender has collapsed into the term images, obscuring the distinction between electronic representations and mental experiences. We tend to reserve the term picture for representations of an older and more concrete kind. As Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen noted in the summer 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry, for Crimp, the turn to picture was a way of opposing the modernism of critic and art historian Michael Fried, but by 2008 Fried himself had taken up the notion of the picture to shore up the aesthetic promise of pictorial art in his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. For modernist aesthetes such as Fried, lefFWall, and others, the category ofpicture became the route by which photography could come to be taken seriously as art and thus brought into alliance with painting. The new culture industry of the Internet has made the old high-low rivalry between painting and photography beside the point; they have a shared fate now. Meanwhile, the surge of photography into contemporary art has raised a host of issues, from philosophical questions about the role of agency in art production to historical questions about how this surge came to pass. 152ee80cbc