The Vision of the Blessed Hermann Joseph

Anthony van Dyck painted this in Antwerp in 1629 for a brotherhood of unmarried men he had joined the year before, a Jesuit sodality of bachelors. Its subject is a medieval mystic, Hermann Joseph, a canon from near Cologne so devoted to the Virgin Mary that, in the vision shown here, she takes him in a kind of spiritual marriage, which is how he gained the name Joseph, after her husband. Van Dyck kneels the man before her in soft, tender colour, an angel steadying him. He had come home from years in Italy and was between the great courts of his life, not yet the star portrait painter to the English king. This was made for his own chapel, among his own confraternity.