Mary Magdalene's Rather Creepy Hair Suits, Portrayed by Early Renaissance Painters

Today (July 22, 2017) we commemorate the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene. I saw the first image on Instagram and thought "wow, that looks like a pantsuit....painted in the 1430's and referring to waaaaay earlier, my how progressive...what's up with that?" 
THEN saw the second image which revealed to me it's actually her hair! Wow!

Hair suits...

Ponder that for a moment...
The imagery is both grotesque and amazing.... It was Mary Magdalene (in many interpretations) who used her hair to wipe her tears from Jesus' feet and anoint them (instead of Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister), thus her hair was an important feature. Perhaps she did have red hair and perhaps she didn't, but many Italian painters portrayed women with red hair. Here is an interesting blog post on red haired Italian women. 
Nice (and a bit creepy) touch of modesty here in these paintings though, covering Mary's naked form with suit-like long hair. First image: a master of Gdansk, an unknown painter circa 1430. Second image: Giovanni Pietro di Birago (Italy, active from 1471-1513).
Third image: Antonio Vivarini (active from 1440-1480). These images are almost akin to modern hairy images of the mythical Bigfoot in some ways, but as I stare at the paintings, I think they're growing on me. If I can love early Renaissance music and the sackbut, krummhorn and shawm, I can surely make the stretch to strange paintings of hair-covered saints!

Here's a very interesting and informative article link Who Framed Mary Magdalene?

Mary Magdalene Raised by Angels in Glory, Unknown from Gdansk, 1430.

Mary Magdalene by Giovanni Pietro di Birago, Italy ca. 1500

Mary Magdalene by Antonio Vivarini, ca. 1460

Gregory of Nyssa

Today the church celebrates the life of Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 - c. 395 C.E.)

* A collect for today:
Almighty God, you have revealed to your Church your eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like your bishop Gregory of Nyssa, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for you live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

* A little history from the Internet School of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/ 

" - Gregory was bishop of #Nyssa from 372 to 376 and from 378 until his death. He is venerated as a saint in Roman #Catholicism, Eastern #Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, #Lutheranism, and #Anglicanism. Gregory, his brother Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus are collectively known as the Cappadocian Fathers."He spent his life in #Cappadocia, a region in central Asia Minor. Together, the Cappadocians are credited with defining Christian orthodoxy in the Eastern Roman Empire, as Augustine (354—430 C.E.) was to do in the West. Gregory was a highly original thinker, drawing inspiration from the pagan Greek philosophical schools, as well as from the Jewish and Eastern Christian traditions, and formulating an original synthesis that was to influence later Byzantine, and possibly even modern European, thought. A central idea in Gregory's writing is the distinction between the transcendent nature and immanent energies of God, and much of his thought is a working out of the implications of that idea in other areas--notably, the world, humanity, history, knowledge, and virtue. This leads him to expand the nature-energies distinction into a general cosmological principle, to apply it particularly to human nature, which he conceives as having been created in God's image, and to rear a theory of unending intellectual and moral perfectibility on the premise that the purpose of human life is literally to become like the infinite nature of God. "

* More information - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Nyssa

#Episcopal #Saints #Anglican #Gregory #philosophy #EDOLA

All Shall be Well

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

~ Julian of Norwich (1342-1416)

(I don't know who did the icon, but I like it because Julian has a cat!) :-)
From what I understand, the cat was her sole companion for a good portion of her life.