08 works, Today, September 25th, is Saint Albert of Jerusalem's day, his story illustrated #267

Unknown artist

Saints Albert & Brocard

I have no further description, at this time

Adam Kossowski

Saints Albert & Brocard

Ceramic

The Friars, Aylesford

Saint Brocard is said to have been one of the first group of hermits at Mount Carmel, and was perhaps the leader of the community on the death of Saint Berthold around 1195. Various details of his life are legendary.

Adam Kossowski (5 December 1905 – 31 March 1986) was a Polish artist, born in Nowy Sącz, notable for his works for the Catholic Church in England, where he arrived in 1943 as a refugee from Soviet labour camps and was invited in 1944 to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen.

In 1923, uncertain about a career as a painter, Kossowski began architecture studies at Warsaw Technical University. But after two years there, he turned to painting and was accepted into the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked on the restoration of paintings at Wawel Castle. In 1929 he returned to Warsaw and its Academy of Fine Arts. Travelling on a government grant, Kossowski experienced Italian art in Rome, Florence, Naples and Sicily.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Kossowski fled east, where he was arrested by invading Russian troops in November 1939. Kossowski was first imprisoned at Skole and then at Kharkov, both in present Ukraine. He was release with other Polish prisoners in order to form the Polish 2nd Corps under General Władysław Anders.

He was evacuated finally with other Poles to the banks of the Caspian Sea from where we went to Pahlevi on the Persian coast. There the Polish ex-prisoners gradually received English uniforms. They then started the journey towards Teheran and from there to Palestine.

Kossowski, travelled on the liner RMS Scythia to Scotland. In 1943 he joined the Polish Ministry of Information in London, where he worked throughout the war.

Working from a studio in Hampstead, Kossowski composed work for his first show in London, which opened on 7 June 1944. 

After winning a prize for the oil painting Jesus Bearing the Cross, in 1944, Kossowski was invited to join the Guild of Catholic Artists.

From 1953 to 1970, Kossowski completed many commissions for large murals and reliefs.

Kossowski died in London on 31 March 1986. More on Adam Kossowski

Albert of Jerusalem was appointed patriarch of Jerusalem in 1205 by Pope Innocent III. At the time of his election he had been count-bishop of Vercelli for some twenty years. The Avogadro family to which he belonged was the most prominent and richest of all the first families of Vercelli.

Giotto di Bondone  (–1337)

Boniface VIII, c.. 1300

Height: 110 cm (43.3 in) Width: 110 cm (43.3 in)

Archbasilica of St. John Lateran,  Rome

Giotto di Bondone (1266/7 – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto, and Latinized as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Renaissance.

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the late-16th century artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."

Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305. This fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.[4] That Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of Florence's Cathedral are among the few certainties of his biography. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birthdate, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether or not he painted the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, and his burial place. More Giotto di Bondone

Albert was more interested in putting his talents into a religious context than in joining the diocesan clergy with all its political ramification. The superior general, Boniface of Novara, started including him in his own ecclesial outreach and he soon achieved wider notice. From being local superior he was chosen to be bishop of Bobbio, but before he could be installed there he was transferred to Vercelli.

Unknown artist

 Henry VI of Swabia (1165-1197), son of Frederick Barbarossa

Miniature from the Codex Manesse, ca 1300

Heidelberg, Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg 

One of Albert’s first official acts shows him requesting and receiving permission to wear the pallium, a papal emblem. Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, even appointed him a Rechtsfürst, or imperial prince with a seat on the council. Albert was immediately drafted into papal matters. He was often asked to mediate between warring parties, sometimes between secular communes, sometimes between religious and diocesan disputes.

Unknown author

Pope Innocent III wearing a Y-shaped pallium, circa 1219

Fresco

Coister Sacro Speco

Author

In 1205 Pope Innocent urged him to accept another election, one that required all the diplomacy and tact for which he was famous – that of Patriarch of Jerusalem. 

In early 1206 Albert finally arrived in the Holy Land. He found things in a dilapidated state. The king and queen who had confirmed his election had both died within 5 days of each other. They left behind a 14-year old heiress who needed to find a husband to help her rule and to govern the powerful and independent barons of the kingdom. 

Unknown artist

Christians and Sarasens

I have no further description, at this time

Christianity in middle ages saw great divide know as Great schism between Eastern and Western churches. Great spilt result divided opinion about the crusades in which christens fought against Muslims over holy land 

Meanwhile he had to keep the local barons from fighting one another, while keeping on good relations with the Saracen rulers.

In 1210 the French king found a husband for the young queen. He was an impoverished second son of the House of Brienne, John of Brienne

Unknown artist
John of Brienne, French Jean de Brienne, Latin emperor of Constantinople (1231–37)

I have no further description, at this time

John arrived in Acre on 13 September 2014. He was met by the patriarch himself. Albert officiated at the wedding of the landless count and the young heiress to the throne. Two weeks later, at the royal residence in Tyre, he crowned them King and Queen of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Unknown artist

Detail; The early Carmelites receive the Rule from St. Albert
I have no further description, at this time

Unknown artist

The early Carmelites receive the Rule from St. Albert
I have no further description, at this time

In the summer of 1254, King Louis IX of France failed the Seventh Crusade and returned to Paris. He was wearing a gray striped monk's uniform and was despised by the citizens of Paris. Instructed by The Pope, the monk's uniform was finally changed to a white cloak in 1287.

A group of hermits petitioned the patriarch for permission to set themselves up on Mt. Carmel and follow a holy way-of-life. They asked him to help supply them with a way-of-life they could follow, and if they might also have his blessing on their new beginnings.

Sister Petra Clare

St. Albert with the holy hermits of Mount Carmel

 Icon

National Shrine of St. Jude in Faversham

The icon depicts Saint Albert, the Latin Patriarch (Roman Catholic Bishop) of Jerusalem

approving the Carmelite way of life and giving a copy of the Rule to Saint Brocard 

Sister Petra Clare was an art student at Shrewsbury and Leeds in the 1960s. Her interest in

iconography developed gradually as her religious vocation grew. After years of discernment she decided that she wanted to be a hermit inspired by the Benedictine tradition, and with permission from Rome received formation specific for this vocation at St. Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight.

In 1995 Sister Petra Clare moved to the Scottish Highlands to develop a skete, a hermitage which allows the members comparative solitude whilst also affording a level of mutual support, not unlike the original Carmelite hermit community on Mount Carmel. Sister’s skete in Invernessshire is dedicated to the Sancti Angeli (Holy Angels), and has a particular vocation to foster relations between the Churches in the West and the East. More on Sister Petra Clare

In 1214 he had been invited to the Fourth Lateran Council, but the Master of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, whom he had rebuked and deposed for immorality, stabbed him to death, while taking part in a procession on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. More on Albert of Jerusalem

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