Luigi Crosio

Many Catholics know a painting by Luigi Crosio without knowing his name. In 1898, in Turin, he painted a Madonna holding the Christ Child and sold the reproduction rights to the Künzli brothers, art publishers in Switzerland. Their prints of the Refugium Peccatorum Madonna, Latin for refuge of sinners, travelled far. One reached the German town of Schoenstatt in 1915, where the priest Joseph Kentenich, founder of the Schoenstatt movement, chose it for the boys of his sodality, a Catholic devotional group. Under the title Mother Thrice Admirable the image now hangs in Schoenstatt shrines in many countries, and in 1964 the Swiss Schoenstatt Sisters bought the original canvas.

Crosio himself was a working genre painter, trained at the Accademia Albertina, Turin's academy of fine arts. He painted costume scenes set in the 17th century, Pompeian subjects and episodes from popular operas, and he also worked as a lithographer. He reportedly used one of his daughters as the model for his Madonnas. Another daughter, Carola, married the mathematician Giuseppe Peano in 1887.