Category: art

  • Today’s saint picture: Saints Mark and Marcellinus

    Today’s saint picture: Saints Mark and Marcellinus

    A pair of saints about whom nothing is known beyond their names which of course means that it was an opening to make things up. So tradition says that they were twin brothers in the Roman nobility who refused to apostosize and were beheaded as a result. The drawing I did here was based on…

  • Today’s saint picture: Saint Albert Chmielowski

    Today’s saint picture: Saint Albert Chmielowski

    Albert Chmielowski is another one of these interesting figures, he was involved with the Polish independence movement in the 19th century and in a battle, was injured by a Russian grenade leading to his losing his leg. He went on to study engineering, but discovered he had a talent at painting so he dropped out…

  • Today’s saint picture: Saint Lutgardis

    Today’s saint picture: Saint Lutgardis

    Catholics have a tendency to overdo it with the priests, monks and nuns in their canon of Saints and Lutgardis falls into that category, although in her case, she originally entered the convent not out of any sense of vocation but because her dowry had been lost in a failed business venture. She was twelve…

  • Today’s Saint Picture: Elisha

    Today’s Saint Picture: Elisha

    Today’s saint picture is of the prophet Elisha. While the old-style designation would be to call him “Saint Elisha,” the title “Saint” for Old Testament figures always feels kind of off to me, but looking at the commemorations for the day, I couldn’t pass up on Elisha since one of his trademark stories was having…

  • Today’s Saint Picture—Saint Barnabas

    Today’s Saint Picture—Saint Barnabas

    One of the fun things about the older saints is that no one has any idea what they actually looked like, Our common image of Jesus with his northern European features is almost certainly far from reality, and the other Biblical figures are likewise likely to be incorrectly imagined. Nevertheless, the icon that I worked…

  • Today’s Saint Picture—Saint Olivia

    Today’s Saint Picture—Saint Olivia

    My Penguin Dictionary of the Saints lists nobody for June 10th, nor does the General Roman Calendar as described on Wikipedia, but among the saints listed under this date on Wikipedia there was Saint Olivia and I used an icon of her as the basis of today’s picture.  Most of the details on her life…

  • Today’s saint picture: Blessed Franz Jäggerstätter

    Today’s saint picture: Blessed Franz Jäggerstätter

    Okay, when I was looking for a saint for today, I almost passed on Blessed Franz here. The photograph that was used for him showed him in a German military uniform and—well, you can imagine how poorly that reflected on Franz. But it turns out that there’s a reason he is often shown wearing the…

  • Today’s crumy saint picture: Saint Boniface

    Today’s crumy saint picture: Saint Boniface

    Yesterday, I accidentally did a saint for June 5th instead of June 4th (thanks, Wikipedia for updating on GMT instead of local time). I suppose I should do a June 4th saint today, but I decided to just google Saint of the Day which turned up Saint Boniface, a Benedictine monk who was martyred trying…

  • Today’s crummy saint picture, Saint Luke Loan Ba Vu

    Today’s crummy saint picture, Saint Luke Loan Ba Vu

    I wasn’t able to find any real information about this Vietnamese martyr online, beyond the link to a general wikipedia article about Vietnamese martyrs which only said that he was a Vietnamese priest. My old parish in California had a sizable Vietnamese community which seemed almost like a separate church within the parish. Unlike the…