Lady of The Rosary

The idea of this picture was born when we visited Apostolic Nuncio Michael A. Blume, Ambassador of Vatican in Budapest last month. His Excellency presented us with a very nice Rosary with the Crest of the Holy Father. I decided on our way home to paint with stamps a picture featuring the Rosary. I found the suitable stamps very quickly. I remembered a beautiful Hungarian series presenting icons exhibited in the Serbian Othodox Museum in the city of Szendendre. Notwithstanding of the fact that I am Lutheran I am well aware that the Rosary is a praying psalter in the Catholic Church and praying the Rosary is an almost everyday practice for catholic people.  The Holy Rosary consists of five decades in each of which one can find ten stones. There is a short introductory part of the Rosary starting with a cross followed by one large and three small stones and another large one.   The stones on my picture are represented by stamps taken from the Icon Series featuring the Mother of God with the Child. The cross is also a Hungarian stamp on which one can see Hungary written on it. I was happy to find a piece having Debrecen stamped on it so everyone can see where the picture was made. The picture became to be a large one so I fell again into the trap and ran out of stamps thus I had to turn to my old friend Csaba Sutóczky, who helped me out once more. It was a great challenge to find the figure of the Lady. Finally I found her and when my daughter Zsofi looked at the picture she shouted: “A praying Angel!”. In my reading the Angel became to be a Lady, the Lady of the Rosemary. To paint her I used stamps with the painting of Mihály Munkácsy’s Flower Still Life the colours of which offer full harmony with those of the stones.