Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

VISITATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. - Feast of the universal Church, celebrated on July 2 with the double rite of the second class.

The basis of the feast is the historical Gospel fact (Lk. 1:39-56), of the visit that the Madonna made, after the announcement of the mystery of the Incarnation, to Elizabeth, mother of the Precursor, with the brief but wondrous scene of the greeting, which closed with the Magnificat. The divine Mother then remained in the house of her relatives for about three months.

The episode entered the official practice of the Roman Church when the liturgy of Advent developed there, that is, from the 6th century onward: the pericope in question was placed on the Friday of the Advent Ember Days, but only as a commemoration in preparation for Christmas (Th. Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum, I, Münster in W. 1935).

On the same Roman date of July 2, the Greek Church celebrates a Marian feast. If one may give credence to later traditions, under the emperor Marcian (450-57) there would have been brought to Constantinople the wooden chest in which the body of the Madonna was said to have been placed after her death; this relic was deposited in the church of the Blachernae. The liturgical celebration appears under the title ἡ σοφὸς τῶν βλασιερῶν. But another tradition reduces the same feast to the κατάθησις, that is, to the deposition, in the same church, under the emperor Leo I, in 469, of a garment of the Madonna, according to Metaphrastes of the « maphorion » (= veil), according to Nicephorus Callistus of the « omophorion » (= scapular). Others believe that the « chest » was nothing other than the precious reliquary in which that garment was enclosed. The emperor Constantine VI later gave this garment to Charlemagne, which from then on was shown at Aachen, especially in the famous « Heiltumsfahrt » that is repeated every nine years. However, Soissons also claims to possess the same garment, brought there from Constantinople in 1204, the year of the city's conquest by the Latins. Attempts have been made to find another basis for the date of July 2, from the same Gospel narrative. Taking March 25 as the date of the Annunciation, and reckoning three months of the Madonna's stay with Elizabeth, taking into account that the birth of the Baptist falls on June 24, judging that the Madonna was still present on the eighth day, when the child was circumcised, she would have departed precisely on July 2, on the day after the octave of St. John.

Be that as it may, at the time of the Crusades the Westerners found in the East, on the date of July 2, a Marian feast, and brought news of it to the West. It was above all the Friars Minor who spread knowledge of this Marian date. St. Bonaventure, general of the Order, at the general Chapter of Pisa in 1263 had the feast of the V. introduced throughout the Franciscan Order, on the date of July 2, whence its rapid diffusion.

Among its most fervent promoters was the powerful archbishop of Prague, John of Jenstein (1388-96), who composed, to implore the help of Mary, a rhymed Office, fixing the feast, for unknown reasons, on April 28.

Urban VI, after the tragic events of his pontificate, in the Consistory of April 8, 1389 deliberated with the cardinals the introduction of the feast on July 2, with a vigil of fasting and with an octave, and also had a rhymed Office prepared by Card. Adam Easton, bishop of London, according to the taste of the time. But he died before he could publish the relevant documents (Oct. 15, 1389). His successor Boniface IX made the idea his own and published, on the date of Nov. 9, 1389, just after being elected, the bull Superni benignitas conditoris (Bull. Rom., ed. Turin, IV, pp. 602-604) prescribing the said feast, with double rite, vigil and octave, and with ample indulgences. The Council of Basel, in sess. XLIII, on July 1, 1441 reconfirmed the bull of Boniface IX (Mansi XXIX, 211-14) but on account of the schism a part of the Church did not accept the feast. Nevertheless the Office, composed in the name of the Council by Thomas de Corcellin, had a certain diffusion. Instead at the ecumenical Council of Florence, under the presidency of Eugene IV, the Syriac, Maronite and Coptic patriarchates accepted the feast, which they still celebrate on the Roman date. Nicholas V, with the bull Romanorum gesta Pontificum (March 26, 1451), republished in full the bull of Boniface IX, with the intention of inducing all particular Churches to accept the feast unanimously (Bull. Rom., ed. Turin, V, pp. 106-107). Sixtus IV, a Franciscan, introduced into the Franciscan liturgical books (1475) a new proper Office with an octave, dedicating his church of S. Maria della Pace to the mystery of the V. Pius V in the general reform of the Roman liturgical books abolished the various offices and masses in use for the said feast, nor did he remove the vigil and the octave, and he adopted the Office from the Nativity of Mary, with a few necessary modifications, and with other lessons. From then on the date of the feast was single, whereas previously it was celebrated, for example, in Paris on June 27, in Reims and Geneva on July 8, in Prague and Regensburg on June 28, in Avranches on April 1, in York on April 2, etc. Clement VIII finally, in the new reform of the liturgical books (1602), raising the feast to the new rite introduced by him of double major, had the Office of the Visitation revised by the Minim p. Ruiz; there were then added proper antiphons and responsories, the lessons were rearranged and introduced, and after this the Office took the form that it still preserves. Pius IX, after the period of the Roman Republic, which ceased precisely on July 2, 1849, raised the feast to the double rite of the second class, which it still retains (decr. Quam Sanctissimus May 31, 1850).

Giuseppe Löw

ART

The oldest known depiction of the Visitation is found in an ivory panel of the chair of Bishop Maximian at Ravenna (6th century). The sacred scene is shown there without the embrace of the Virgin and St. Elizabeth, today traditional, which is found instead in a miniature of the book of homilies by the Greek monk James, of the 11th century, now in the National Library of Paris.

In the 12th century the type of the very simple scene with the two ladies was already fixed, as can be seen in a marble high relief in the Bishop's Palace of Pano, in a panel of the bronze side door of the cathedral of Pisa, the work of Bonanno, datable to around 1180, in the paschal candlestick of the cathedral of Gaeta, where an angel attends the sacred scene. The same scheme is followed by the Visitation painted among the side scenes of the antependium of St. John, a work in a Byzantine style of the first twenty years of the 13th century, preserved in the Gallery of Siena.

The depictions of the late Middle Ages are usually enriched by the presence of two handmaidens behind the Virgin and St. Elizabeth respectively. The oldest depiction of this type is seen among the enamels of the portable altar of Eilbert, a work of German goldsmithing, datable between 1150 and 1160; in Italian art in one of the scenes of the mosaic vault, in the Florentine Baptistery, executed around 1270, in Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and again in the Visitation inserted among the high reliefs of the pulpit of the cathedral of Siena, the work of Niccolò Pisano and assistants of c. 1268, and also among those of the pulpit of the cathedral of Pisa, the work of Giovanni Pisano, of the early fourteenth century, and among the bas-reliefs of the facade of the Cathedral of Orvieto, held to be by Lorenzo Maitani and executed between 1320 and 1330. A very beautiful depiction of the same type is also found in the cathedral of Pistoia in a panel of the silver antependium, made in 1368 by Andrea di Jacopo d'Ognabene.

In some fourteenth-century depictions of the Visitation, due to Florentine art, only the handmaiden following the Virgin appears. Thus did Andrea da Pontedera in a panel of his door of the Florentine Baptistery, cast in bronze in 1336, and Taddeo Gaddi in a small panel painted around 1340, now in the Museum of the Academy of Florence. Fra Angelico around 1440 in the predella of the Annunciation of Cortona and in that of the Annunciation of Montecarlo at S. Giovanni Valdarno, followed the scheme of the two handmaidens; so did his pupil Zenobi Strozzi in the predella of the Annunciation, now in the Prado of Madrid. Late Gothic art beyond the Alps did not usually paint the handmaidens; thus on the panel of an anonymous fifteenth-century master of the Swabian school, in the Civic Museum of Vipiteno, and on that of Rogier Van der Weyden, of the Museum of Turin.

It was the Renaissance that introduced changes into the scene, first of all in the attitude of St. Elizabeth, who is often seen kneeling before the Virgin: as in a glazed terracotta of the school of the Della Robbia on an altar at Pistoia, and Domenico Ghirlandaio in a painting of 1491 (Louvre, Paris), where two handmaidens are still seen. But around 1500 they are replaced by a sumptuous retinue. A fresco by Ghirlandaio (around 1490) in the main chapel of S. Maria Novella in Florence foreshadows this scheme. In Pinturicchio's fresco of the Appartamento Borgia, completed in 1497, the Virgin is accompanied by St. Joseph. In the same way as in the stained-glass window of Guillaume de Marcillac, in the choir of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome. In the Visitation attributed to Andrea del Sarto (Spada Gallery in Rome) the scene is set in a square, as also in the panel of Vittore Carpaccio, of the Museum of Venice. Pontormo, in the fresco painted in 1516 in the cloister of the Voti of the S.ma Annunciata in Florence, and Sodoma in that painted around 1530 in the oratory of S. Bernardino of Siena, made of the Visitation a grand ceremonial courtly scene, followed toward the middle of the sixteenth century by Francesco Salviati in the fresco of the oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato in Rome. The work of the Florentine Mariotto Albertinelli, now in the Uffizi, painted in 1503, instead recalls the concise medieval figurative model. A revival of it, with a representation of the Annunciation in the foreground, was executed some years later by the Sienese Girolamo del Pacchia, now in the Gallery of Siena. By Giacomo Pacchiarotti a beautiful Visitation is preserved in the same Gallery of Siena, which unfolds against the background of a magnificent Roman arch placed in perspective and which is attended by six different saints grouped at the sides. By the same Pacchiarotti there is also in the Gallery of Siena another Visitation, with two handmaidens, painted in the central part of a triptych where St. Joachim is next to St. Elizabeth.

The depictions of the Visitation of the late sixteenth century sometimes give the image of a pathetic recollection: notable is the altarpiece of Barocci in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. An exquisite seventeenth-century work for its sweet quality of a genre scene is the Visitation painted in a picture of the Borghese Gallery, once attributed to P. P. Rubens (of c. 1630), now held to be by his pupil Martin Mandrekens. — See pl. CL.

Witold Wehr