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Monday Morning Memo

When the wizard and Princess Pennie bought this 400-year-old renaissance trunk at auction, Christina Gressianu volunteered to pick it up near her home in Colorado, store it, then drive it to the Wizard of Ads partner meeting in Fort Worth. Christina is a highly celebrated and award-winning photographer. During the weeks the trunk was stored safely in her studio, it served as a prop for the occasional portrait. How cool is that! Christina Gressianu and Vi Wickam, a Wizard of Ads partner, were married at Chapel Dulcinea. Sadly, our trunk is not quite old enough to be the one in which Leonardo da Vinci stored the Mona Lisa. It was found in a trunk similar to this one when he died in 1519.

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Random Quote:

“Here, Mary is Leonardo’s focus. Mary’s right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense. Her fingers are pressing into John’s back, but the thumb is over his shoulder, and what she’s doing is holding him back! Mary, in the popular theology that Leonardo and everyone at the time knew, already understood her son must one day die, and here he shows her preventing the prophet of her own son’s future death from drawing near to Christ.

Christ, the child at her left, accepts this future death, indeed he is staring at John the Baptist and he’s blessing him.

She’s lowering her left hand toward his head, but her hand can never reach her child’s head, because there’s a figure, an angel, kneeling behind her son, and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.

Mary, as human mother, knows her son must die but cannot accept that. And so God sends his angel to prevent Mary’s instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from avoiding the future passion.

It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance. Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery, which is, how, in a woman prepared from all eternity to bear the son of God, humanity still fully expresses itself.”

- Monsignor Timothy Verdon, art historian, speaking of Leonardo's 'Virgin of the Rocks' in Leonardo: the Disciple of Experience, a documentary by Ken Burns

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