Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Iconography

This is Bitterness Street, with a particularly tragic Virgin to tell non-readers the name of the street.

This is the door of the Nuestra Señora de la O church. The illegible sign at the bottom says that as of March 5th, the way is clear for you to organise your 2008 wedding there.
I was intrigued by Nuestra Señora de la O - it appears (seriously) that one of the proposed etymologies for this name is that it derives from the cry of joy the Virgin gave when she realised she was going to give birth to the Redeemer. Another possibility is that it is a folk etymology deriving from the 'O' at the beginning of the Magnificat. Her feast day is 18 December.

It has nothing to do with The Story of O (and therefore is not a companion piece to Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, known to the Italians as Santa Teresa in Orgasmo).
Charles de Brosses, about whom I know no more than the contents of this article (and the following anecdote), said, upon seeing Bernini's statue, 'If this be divine love, I know it well.' As the man said, they order these things better...

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