Giovanni Odazzi
The Apparition of the Virgin to St. Bruno

1700
Painting
Chapel of St. Bruno
Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri, Rome

From above the Virgin Mary hands St. Bruno the statutes for the Carthusian order. In fact the Carthusians did not have written statutes until 1127, well after Bruno's death in 1101. So one might say the figure of Bruno here represents the saint himself but the order as a whole. Similarly there was no formal papal recognition of the order in the saint's lifetime, so the keys we see St. Peter offering to the saint would represent a later event in the order's history – perhaps Innocent II's approval of the statutes in 1133.

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Photographed at the church by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.