Word: madonna
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...little Madonna was a poor thing. She was made of plaster, and her face was blank and pink. In the shapeless, pudgy fingers of her right hand she held a bleeding heart limned in red and gold. She was exactly like hundreds of other foot-high, hollow, plaster Madonnas that the Sicilian factory sold for $3, and like many of them she was a wedding present-to Antonietta and Angelo lannuso of Syracuse. Soon after they got the present in the spring of 1953, the commotion began...
Dark, devout Antonietta, then 20, became pregnant and began to suffer agonizing pains, during which her sight became clouded, and she prayed fervently to the Madonna for deliverance. Then, she recalls, on the morning of Aug. 29, 1953, in the midst of one of these seizures, "I saw tears pouring down the Madonna's face. It was incredible. For a moment I thought I was mad. She was crying like a child. Then I began to shout, 'La Madonnina piange [The little Madonna is weeping...
...Tears Like Pearls. Antonietta's mother and sister-in-law thought she was hysterical, tried to calm her until they looked at the Madonna. "So plentiful were those tears," wrote a monk reporting the case, "that they spilled over into the right hand holding the heart...
...painting, which Vasari noted was "rapidly perishing," but the fact that Petrarch had mentioned Martini in two sonnets. Last week history reversed Vasari's order of precedence. Few but antiquarians care whether Martini was mentioned by Petrarch or not, but the discovery of a hitherto unknown Martini Madonna and Child (see cut] is the talk of Italian art circles, where it is being hailed as the painting discovery of the year...
...restorers to repair the undistinguished painting that for centuries had hung over the main altar. Preliminary cleaning flaked away the overpainting, revealed a lovely eye, "long, sweet and melancholy." Shipped to Rome's Restoration Institute, the painting has been carefully worked over for the past seven months. The Madonna which emerged, with amaranth-red robe, gilt-edged blue veil and glittering gold medallion is judged by critics the finest Martini oil painting known. Nonagenarian Renaissance Critic Bernard Berenson, who once called Martini "the most lovable of all the Italian artists before the Renaissance," said of the discovery...