Moça Lituana com Ramos do Domingo de Ramos

Kanuty Rusiecki painted this in Vilnius in 1844, when he was the city's most admired artist and Lithuania was a province of the Russian Empire, its own culture quietly pushed to the margins. A young woman in traditional dress stands before a Baroque church, holding a bundle of dried grasses and willow, the Palm Sunday fronds that Lithuanians still call verbos, carried to church in place of palm branches. Behind her a Rococo altar shows Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, the Vilnius icon at the heart of local devotion. Rusiecki usually painted portraits, but here he lifted an everyday religious custom into something dignified and grand. The bright woven verbos she holds are still made in Lithuanian villages every spring and sold in the streets of Vilnius before Easter.