Use this Art Guide video in Step 3: Contemplation of Columban 
A resource to help you pray using the images and Art Guide of the 2023 Columban Art Calendar.
Madonna at Prayer II, c.1640–1650 Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato (1609–1685) Restored Traditions.
Giovanni Battista Salvi, a seventeenth-century Italian painter, is better known as Sassoferrato after the town of his birth in the Marches region of central Italy. Sassoferrato worked in the post-Reformation Baroque era in Europe and specialised in devotional images of the Virgin Mary, often depicted alone or with the child Jesus. This beautiful painting of the Madonna in prayer is a fine example of the artist’s committed response to the renewed emphasis on devotion to the Virgin Mary, founded on tenets of the Counter-Reformation Church in Rome.
Mary is represented alone with eyes downcast and hands reverently clasped in contemplative prayer. Her singular focus is on the divine presence within, emphasised by her glowing halo and the luminosity of her face. Unlike the Madonnas of the earlier Renaissance period in Italy, Mary’s hair is concealed beneath a white veil and her robes of ultramarine blue and rose madder indicate the traditional symbolic associations of divinity and humanity, respectively.
This painting, known as ‘Madonna at Prayer II’, relates to several variations of this subject created in Rome by Sassoferrato from 1640 to 1650. These Madonna in Prayer images continue to invoke a state of prayerful contemplation in keeping with the example offered by the Mother of God in solitude and love with her divine Son.
