Interior of the Monastery of Saint Mary of Guadalupe with the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura. Spain.
Wikipedia: The shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe was the most important Marian shrine in the medieval kingdom of Castile. The image is enshrined in the Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, in today's province of Cáceres in the Extremadura autonomous community of Spain. It is one of three Black Madonnas in Spain. The statue was canonically crowned on 12 October 1928 by Pope Pius XI with a crown designed and crafted by Father Felix Granda, and crowned in the presence of King Alfonso XIII of Spain. It is not to be confused with Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is a separate title and devotion to a different image enshrined in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico. The shrine houses a statue reputed to have been carved by Luke the Evangelist and given to Saint Leander, Archbishop of Seville, by Pope Gregory I. According to local legend, when Seville was taken by the Moors in 712, a group of priests fled northward and buried the statue in the hills near the Guadalupe River in Extremadura. At the beginning of the 14th century, the Virgin Mary appeared to a humble cowboy named Gil Cordero who was searching for a missing animal in the mountains Cordero claimed that the Virgin had ordered him to ask priests to dig at the place of her apparition. The priests rediscovered the hidden statue, and built a small shrine around it which became the nucleus of the present monastery. The polychromed cedar sculpture is just over two feet in height. It is a Black Madonna, in the style known as Sedes Sapientiae or the "Seat of Wisdom", with the Christ Child on Mary's lap. Since at least the late 14th century, the wooden figure has been almost completely clothed in embroidered and brocaded vestments, leaving only the faces and hands of mother and child visible. Costly robes, deemed suitable for the Queen of Heaven, were often elaborately stitched in gold thread and set with precious gems, attesting to both the honor due the Virgin and the wealth of the donors. The underlying sculpture is
Size: 7259px × 4839px
Location: Guadalupe, province of Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain
Photo credit: © Bert de Ruiter / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: architecture, basilica, bert, black, caceres, catholic, catholicism, chandeliers, chapel, church, de, extremadura, face, faith, guadalupe, holy, horizontal, illumination, indoor, interior, lady, landscape, lights, maria, medieval, monasterio, monastery, ornate, religion, religious, ruiter, santa, shrine, spain, spanish, travel, virgin
