The altar at St. Aloysius Church in Washington, DC (c. 1857), bears a
mosaic of the Pelican at center. (Above the altar is an enormous painting
of the communion of St. Aloysius, by Constantino Brumidi; I think he also
did the stations of the cross, though I may be wrong.) Stephen Douglas
appears as one of the characters.
(When the church was under restoration a few years ago, the ceiling beams
were termporarily exposed -- enormous California redwood beams. I saw them
with a former teacher of mine, who pointed out that when the church was
built, the trans-continental railroad had not yet come into being, which
means those beams were shipped all the way round South America.)
>>Nurturing, if not maternal per se, is the image of Jesus as Pelican, a
>bird believed to feed its young with blood from its own breast.
>
>And, the image survived the MA as (at least) the printer's mark of Sebastian
>Cramoisy (I think it was), one of the more prominent French
>theological and scholarly publishers of the 17-18th cc.
>
>Quite a nice little woodcut, found on the title pages of his books.
>
>cc
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__________________________________
Patrick J. Nugent
Department of Religion
Earlham College
Richmond, Indiana 47374 USA
(765) 983-1413
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