This author may have discovered the original painting of Our Lady by St. Luke

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This author may have discovered the original painting of Our Lady by St. Luke
LifeSiteNews is pleased to present the latest great discovery of author Paul Badde, who has been able to locate the painting that, 

most probably, Saint Luke himself painted of Our Lady.



Author and journalist Paul Badde with the painting of Our Lady potential created by St. Luke
Maike Hickson / LifeSiteNews

Aug 28, 2024
(LifeSiteNews) — Paul Badde is a journalist and author who has been specially blessed with some stunning discoveries. For some reason, it has come to him to help Christianity recover amazing images and items of our beloved Catholic faith. He also played a historic role in helping to thwart the papal election of Jorge Bergoglio in 2005.

LifeSiteNews has mentioned in the past Badde’s report on the discovery of the Holy Face of Manoppello, a veil that contains an imprint of the face of Jesus Christ and stems most probably from the moment of His Resurrection. It is a silken veil that is kept in a church in the Abruzzo mountains of Italy and that contains no traces of paint on it. That is to say, it is not man-made. Due to Badde’s discoveries, it was none other than Pope Benedict XVI who, in 2006, made a pilgrimage to this true face of Our Lord.

But not only that. Among other things, Badde was able to locate in Jerusalem the very judgement stone upon which Jesus Christ Himself might have been judged by Pontius Pilate on Good Friday. It is an exciting story, and LifeSite recommends that our readers listen to it here. 

The ‘Advocata’ painting of Our Lady

In his latest great discovery, Paul Badde has been able to locate the painting that, most probably, Saint Luke himself painted of Our Lady. The painting is the mother painting and icon of many other paintings in the West and in the East that have the reputation of being related to St. Luke.

Paul Badde even goes so far as to say that this was the beginning of the Christian West’s abandonment of the Jewish ban on images of God and human beings. This original painting is called “Advocata,” and it is to be found in a hidden monastery on Monte Mario in Rome. Since the 11th century, it has had the reputation of being been painted by St. Luke.

Similar to his discovery of the Holy Face of Manoppello, Paul Badde met people along the way who helped him find the original icon of Our Lady. His quest took some twenty years, which he now describes in a spell-binding manner in Die Lukas-Ikone (a new book in German).

Author Paul Badde with his new book (Credit: Maike Hickson)

During his work as a journalist in Jerusalem at the beginning of the second millennium, Badde met on Mount Zion the icon painter Father Bernhard Maria Alter, OSB a priest who assured him that there existed in Rome on Monte Mario one special painting of Our Lady – the “true original icon” related to the other paintings. Many other paintings are said to have been painted by St. Luke but clearly date to periods after the life of Our Lady here on earth. Yet, as Badde is able to show, this one painting is datable by way of technique (wax technique) and style (similar to Egyptian paintings from Fayum that date back to the first centuries AD), and is thus traceable to the lifetime of Our Lady and St. Luke themselves. In addition, there is a text which mentions a special painting of Our Lady that was carried through water, and the icon of St. Luke does have clear signs of water damage. 

In his new book, Paul Badde takes us back to the time when he started his quest and how it progressed. It is a striking and exciting story. Multiple times, for example, he and his wife Ellen visited the Monte Mario hill in Rome where the painting was located, finally finding it by accident more than anything!

On All Souls’ Day last year, Paul Badde was so kind as to lead me to that very monastery and to the “Advocata,” in front of which he gave an explanation of the ordeal.

At the time, he was still writing his book, and it has just now been released in the German language by Christiana Verlag. Translated from German, the book is aptly titled, The Icon of St. Luke: Rome’s Hidden Wonder of the World.

The painting that Paul Badde discovered a few years ago in Rome is called “Advocata,” or “Advocata Nostra,” and it is kept in Santa Madonna del Rosario, a Dominican monastery where the sisters preserve and venerate this icon, along with some major relics of great Dominican saints, including relics of St. Dominic himself, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Over the altar of the church is a painting of Our Lady handing St. Dominic the rosary. Could one imagine St. Dominic seeing Our Lady in a vision, that same face that is on this icon?

The painting of the “Advocata” is stunning. Our Lady is beautiful, and to look at her touches the heart. Our Lady serenely looks out of the picture and into the eyes of the onlooker. She is a mature woman who has seen suffering. But she is serene and pure. And she does not hold a baby in her arm, which makes sense if one were to consider that St. Luke would have painted her after the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of her Son. Instead, her hands are lifted upward, in parallel fashion, as if she were holding something. Badde is able to show that there exist many copies of that depiction of Our Lady with the same gesture and appearance in different places in Italy and elsewhere (such as, for example, in Freising, Germany), not at least in the grottos under St. Peter’s. That Advocata painting must have been considered to be special to be copied so many times – another hint it is truly the “original icon.” 

Moreover, since the Advocata icon must have traveled, most probably together with the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Veil of Manoppello, to Constantinople, there are numerous icons in the East that very closely resemble that of the Advocata. A further sign of the importance of this icon. Given the widespread nature of the image, it follows that people must have known that it was one of the key icons of early Christianity. Here is an example of a newly discovered Fresco from before the 8th century from the Greek isle of Naxos, that has a stunning resemblance to the Advocata. Another copy of the Advocata can be discovered in the 11th century painting by a Byzantine painter, here. Looking at these images, one could easily posit that much of the iconography of Our Lady in the East has been influenced by this original icon of St. Luke. 

The Madonna as Advocate (Haghiosoritissa) (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In Badde’s view, this original Advocata icon that influenced so many other paintings and icons must have been created by Saint Luke at the time of the First Council of the Apostles in the year 48, when the Apostles came together in Jerusalem in order to settle questions of the Faith. It was most probably here that St. Luke met Our Lady for the first time. She had lived, since the death of Her Son, in Ephesus, together with St. John the Evangelist. Though there are no historical documents to prove it, Badde’s reconstruction would make sense. There is, however, another key element that convinced me as a reader. 

Badde tells us that St. Dominic, when his first Dominican sisters refused to move into a new building, the San Sisto Vecchio monastery in Rome, without that very painting of Our Lady, carried it in the 13th century by foot to the new monastery. That is to say, even then the painting was already held in the highest esteem. I wonder whether St. Dominic recognized, when carrying that painting, the Blessed Mother on it. 

But that is not the key of the story. During their research, Badde and his wife had learned that the painting had been restored in 1960, and in the historical records of that restoration, they were able to learn that Our Lady earlier on held some sort of white linen or cloth in her extended, outstretched hand. This discovery led him to think that perhaps there would be other paintings from the time of St. Dominic with hints of that original image of the hand that is now covered up with gold.

So Paul Badde and his wife went to see a painted crucifix in the Basilica of San Domenico in Arezzo that was painted only some 40 years after St. Dominic had carried the Advocata himself. On that crucifix is painted a small copy of the Advocata, in a different gesture, but with a white veil in her hands.

That white veil is important. It could show that Our Lady had been painted by St. Luke as the “Advocata” with the cloth of Jesus’s Face on it, that very cloth that Badde was blessed to discover, with the help of others of course, in Manoppello. 

It would make perfectly sense to think that Our Lady would only want to be painted as the “Christbearer”, that is, as the woman who bore Christ. In her humility, she would not have wanted a portrait of herself, for the sake of herself. She only would have wanted to be the one who holds a depiction of Her Son in her hands or arms. That is at least how the author of this article could picture it.

There exist very old texts in the East that speak about Our Lady having in her possession after the death of her Son a cloth in front of which she would kneel and pray. In our pious imagination, that would have been the Face of Manoppello. After offering up Her Son at the First Mass, on Calvary, she would certainly would have wanted to keep that image of Him that was found in the tomb on the day of His Resurrection. We recall how St. John describes the scene when he entered the tomb: he “saw (the linens and the sudarium, the head cloth) and believed” (John 20:8).

He might not have necessarily believed had there been just the linen cloths lying in the empty tomb. Remember even the linen that we call today the Shroud of Turin became only more clearly visible at the end of the 19th century. But he might have seen the face of Our Lord on that one cloth, “sudarium,” that convinced him of the fact that Our Lord had risen. 

It can then also be assumed that, should St. Luke have met Our Lady first at the First Council of the Church in Jerusalem, he would have also seen, for the first time, the image of Our Lord on that cloth. The very fact that Our Lord chose to leave an image of His behind, surely convinced St. Luke that the old Jewish law that forbids any images of God or even of any human being was being rescinded herewith by God Himself. And Our Lady would have known that from that first Easter on.

Heinz Liechti, a Catholic who admires Paul Badde’s work on these holy images and has done his own research in this field, shared with LifeSite the following insight: “The epochal insight of Paul Badde’s Advocata book is that he can prove [the images of] Manoppello and Advocata in such a way that it is clear that this sequence, M+A, led to the overthrow of the Jewish prohibition of images.” That is to say, the two true faces of God and His Mother left behind on earth did away with the Jewish ban on images of God and man and opened up the path to Christian paintings as we know them.

Also important is another aspect that came from correspondence with Mr. Liechtl: when one compares both images of the Advocata and of Manoppello, one sees a clear resemblance between God and His Mother, especially the eyes: they have the same color, and their pupils are even in nearly the same position on both images! Next to it, one sees in both set of eyes the white under the black pupils, which is also a striking resemblance. Both faces have beautifully formed eyebrows, as well. 

Credit: Heinz Liechti

Thus, the white veil in the hands of the Advocata – the remnants of which have been again covered up by some golden plates after its restoration – gives us a strong hint that it truly could have been that that painting was created by St. Luke during Our Lady’s lifetime. She was holding her Son’s face in her hands.

An Eastern depiction of Our Lady holding a veil

To return to Paul Badde’s book on the Advocata. He points out that it is St. Luke, of all Evangelists, who reveals the most about Our Lady in the entire New Testament.  Speaking of all the five Joyful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, Badde explains that “all these stories and their contemplation we owe to St. Luke.” Also the more detailed story of Christmas, as we contemplate it every year anew, stems from St. Luke who himself was not blessed with the meeting of Our Lord. This fact could be used as an argument that St. Luke met Our Lady during her lifetime and learned elements of her life from her directly.

Admittedly, many aspects in this story are yet to be proven. For example, while we can say that the painting method stems from the first centuries, the wood panel of the painting has not yet been dated. Further research into many of these aspects should be done. Thanks to Paul Badde’s hard work that took place over the course of some twenty years, this research can now be done.

In the meantime, I highly recommend an English-speaking publisher to translate this book into English so that our readers can read it for themselves. And I highly recommend that our readers, next time they are in Rome, visit the small Dominican church Madonna del Rosario on Monte Mario, and pay their respects to the most stunning painting of Our Lady, the Advocata.