Marie Spartali Stillman: How the Virgin Came to Brother Conrad, 1892

Maria Spartali (1844-1927) was born to a Greek family living in London. She was a celebrated beauty and modelled for the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She appears with Alexa Wilding in the latter's The Bower Meadow of 1872.  An accomplished artist, she studied under the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, although her style shows more of the influence of Rossetti. The early Pre-Raphaelites believed in a return to the highly finished, detailed surfaces and subject matter of the Italian School prior to the changes of the High Renaissance. Through Rossetti's circle of friends she met and married the American journalist and photographer William J.Stillman.

This painting depicts the scene where the Italian saint, Conrad of Offida is having a vision of the Virgin Mary, who is appearing to him, while she offers His son to the hands of the kneeling monk. A book lies in the ground, possibly his breviary. In the place where the Virgin appears, several white lilies are seen, as symbols of her purity. A wooden cross is at the place of the apparition. The model for this monk was William Stillman, Spartali's husband. A landscape of Tuscany is seen at the distance, through the vegetation, with a tower visible.

Spartali created several paintings inspired by episodes from the lives of saints, like the current one, The Childhood of Saint Cecily (1892) and Saint Francis Blessing the Pigeons He Has Freed (1902). The painter was living in Rome at the time, and it seems to have been influenced by Renaissance, specially Florentine painting. 

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HC-1469: card size 7" x 5" (178mm x 127mm)