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Saint Luke, 1621, Guido Reni

Feast of Saint Luke

(1st c.)

St. Luke the Evangelist (1st c.) was a well-educated Greek physician and a native of Antioch in Syria. He was one of the earliest converts to Christianity, believed to have been one of Jesus’ seventy disciples. He was a follower of St. Paul the Apostle and spent most of his life evangelizing with him in Asia Minor up until the time of Paul’s martyrdom in Rome. Luke wrote a canonical account of his apostolic journeys with Paul (the Book of Acts) as well as a biography on the life of Christ (the Gospel of Luke). The two books of Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles were originally a single work. The intimate accounts contained in Luke’s gospel of the early years of Christ’s life (the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation, etc.) lead many scholars to believe that one of the eyewitnesses he interviewed was the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. According to tradition he was also a skilled artist and painted the first icons of Our Lady with the Child Jesus. Several of these icons are still venerated today, the most famous of which hangs in the Church of St. Mary Major in Rome. St. Luke is the patron saint of many trades including artists, painters, doctors, surgeons, and bachelors. His feast day is October 18th.

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In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.”

cf. Gospel of Luke 1:26-27
St. Luke is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, painted in 1625 and now in the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa. The painting shows St. Luke sitting at a desk reading with an ox at his elbow. This painting was documented in the 18th-century but was considered lost until the 1950s, when two tronies were discovered languishing in the storerooms of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art in 1958 by art historian Irina Linnik. At the time they were considered to be by unknown 19th-century painters, but Linnik recognized them as the work of a 17th-century master and eventually traced their history back to the 17th century, identifying them as two of four lost paintings by Hals of the evangelists, namely Luke and Matthew. After her work was published in 1959, the two paintings were included in the 1962 Frans Hals exhibition in the Frans Hals Museum. The international attention helped to spur art detectives and eventually the other two of John and Mark were also rediscovered. In his 1989 catalog of the international Frans Hals exhibition, Slive included a detail of Hals’ The Banquet of the Officers of the St Adrian Militia Company in 1627 with the head of Johan Damius to show that he was the probable model for St. Luke, though with a bit less hair. Damius and Luke: The four evangelists by Hals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Luke,_by_Frans_Hals

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Luke 2:14
Giorgio Vasari (artist) Florentine, 1511 – 1574. Saint Luke, patron saint of painters, with his attribute of a winged ox, is seen in the act of painting or drawing (a faint sketch of Madonna and Child is barely visible over his right shoulder).

Saint Luke, Apostle, Martyr, pray for us.

Be not afraid!  And may the peace of Christ be with you and your loved ones today and always.  Holy Family pray for us.  Amen.

The Holy Family, Murillo
The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities (c. 1675-82) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617 – 1682)

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