Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large 15th-century panel painting, oil and tempera on oak, attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden and usually dated between 1435 and 1440. Housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it shows Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of artists, sketching the Virgin Mary as she nurses the Child Jesus. The figures are positioned in a bourgeois interior which leads out towards a courtyard, river, town and landscape. The enclosed garden, illusionistic carvings of Adam and Eve on the arms of Mary's throne, and attributes of St Luke are amongst the painting's iconographic symbols. The face of Luke is accepted as van der Weyden's self-portrait. The painting's historical significance rests on both the skill behind the design and its merging of earthly and divine realms. By positioning himself in the same space as the Madonna, and showing a painter in the act of portrayal, Van der Weyden brings to the fore the role of artistic creativity in 15th-century society. The panel became widely influential with near copies by the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula and Hugo van der Goes.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Luke_Drawing_the_Virgin

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1757:

English poet Christopher Smart was admitted into St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London, beginning his six-year confinement to mental asylums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Smart%27s_asylum_confinement

1801:

French Revolutionary Wars: The outmanned and outgunned HMS Speedy captured the 32-gun Spanish frigate El Gamo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_6_May_1801

1937:

The German zeppelin Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during an attempt to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, killing 36 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg

1954:

At Oxford's Iffley Road Track, English runner Roger Bannister became the first person to run the mile in under four minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

2013:

Amanda Berry escaped from the Cleveland, Ohio, home of her captor Ariel Castro having been held there with two other women for ten years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Castro_kidnappings

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

measly: 1. Particularly of pigs or pork: infected with larval tapeworms or trichinae (parasitic roundworms). 2. Of a person: infected with measles. 3. Small (especially contemptibly small) in amount; miserable, paltry, trifling. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/measly

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

They buried my body And they thought I'd gone, But I am the Dance, And I still go on. They cut me down And I leapt up high; I am the life That'll never, never die; I'll live in you If you'll live in me — I am the Lord Of the Dance, said he.   --Sydney Carter https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sydney_Carter