The Madonna of Paradise, Our Lady of Good Counsel

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, devotional images composed of cut and reassembled prints elaborately adorned with paint, fabric, and other materials found a ready market throughout Catholic Europe. Vividly colored and multitextured, these works stimulated spiritual devotion through their alluring optical and tactile qualities. Long thought to be the products of amateur practitioners, devotional assemblages were more often professionally made, with dedicated industries concentrated in Antwerp and Southern Germany. These works belong to a well-established practice of altering, combining, and repurposing printed images, and they exhibit a sophisticated handling of materials. An especially ornate example represents a celebrated image of the Virgin and Christ Child from Genazzano, Italy. The icon appears twice: within the vignette depicting the fifteenth-century legend of the fresco’s miraculous appearance, and at center, encircled by layers of printed paper, fabric, and glittering gold thread.