「罪人の避難所」の聖母

Luigi Crosio painted this Madonna in 1898, near the end of a long career in Turin, and he painted it for a Swiss firm, the Kunzli brothers, who printed and sold religious pictures. In other words it was made from the start to be reproduced, in an age when cheap colour printing was putting holy images into ordinary homes by the thousand. The Virgin holds the sleeping Christ child wrapped against her, her head bowed and covered. Crosio is said to have posed one of his own daughters for her. The Latin title means refuge of sinners. Much later, in the 1960s, a Swiss community of the Schoenstatt movement bought the original canvas, renamed it the Mother Thrice Admirable, and carried the image out across the world.