“IN THOSE days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judaean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’” (Luke 1.39-42).
Jacques Daret’s painting of the Visitation shows Mary and Elizabeth looking into each other’s eyes with a smiling wonder: two women sharing their private joy. Elizabeth, now in her sixth month of pregnancy, gently touches her young cousin. “You, too?” she seems to be saying, as she feels her own baby kicking inside her. In the picture the Abbot of St Vaast (Vedast), Jean du Clercq, kneels before them, his abbatial staff in hand and his mitre on the ground beside him: a humbling of his tokens of status which might otherwise be mistaken for hubris. In the background, we see his abbey and the town of Arras.
In 1433, du Clercq commissioned Daret to paint a new altarpiece for the abbey. It comprised four panels depicting scenes from the life of our Lady: the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The panels are now dispersed among various museums, this one in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
In 1435, meetings of the Congress of Arras took place in the abbey. After 100 years of intermittent war, the three great powers of Europe met to settle terms of peace. The English delegation was led by the Archbishop of York (on behalf of the teenage Lancastrian King, Henry VI), the French by the Duke of Bourbon (on behalf of the Valois King, Charles VII), and the third great European power by its leader, Philip, Duke of Burgundy. They met under the authority of two papal legates: Cardinal Albergati and Cardinal Hugues de Lusignan.
Negotiations set a pattern for the future: the English, ill-tempered from the start, departed halfway through the proceedings in a huff. Unwisely, they left Burgundy and France — hitherto bitter rivals — to forge an alliance. It was a turning-point in European politics, and marked the beginning of England’s isolation and withdrawal from continental Europe.
WHAT, one wonders, would our Lady have thought of it all? The question is not flippant, the purpose of prayerful meditation being to bring heaven down to earth. We look at the two women and imagine their joy: two expectant mothers greeting each other in their shared happiness.
It is such an ordinary experience, this waiting for a birth, and yet utterly unique, as every pregnancy and every birth must always be. Meanwhile, next door to this private encounter — just down the corridor — sits the papal legate, the saintly Cardinal Albergati, nursing an injured foot in the Abbot’s best room. He and his fellow mediator, Cardinal de Lusignan, have come to bring peace to a fractured world.
When the congress eventually agreed terms, the treaty between Burgundy and France was sealed by oath at the high altar of the abbey. In their prayers, these great officers of Church and State — cardinals and archbishops, kings and dukes — invoked the aid of our Lady. In doing so, they would have recited in their devotions the words of the popular Salve Regina. Near where they knelt, and within sight, was Daret’s painting, bringing to mind not the Queen of Heaven, but a young woman in her third month of pregnancy, visiting her cousin.
Arras, which had witnessed the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years War, became itself the victim of another war. Continuous shelling in 1914-15 reduced much of the town to rubble, including the cathedral, which had once been the abbey church. Photographs show scenes painfully familiar to us now, as we see on our screens the recent destruction of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city named after Mary the mother of our Lord. Arras 100 years ago, and now Mariupol six months ago: each in its way unique, both now reduced to ruin.
We saw on our screens the rescuers carrying from the rubble the broken body of a dying woman, Irina, with her unborn son. She had named him Miron, after the Russian word for peace. Who could fail to weep? And how could we answer her husband’s anguished cry, “What for? . . . What for?” There was no answer, as there was no answer to our Lord’s cry of dereliction on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
AS MARY stood at the cross, she could not have known how the story would end. For her, this was the end. Darkness fell early that afternoon. Later, she watched them take her son’s body away. Golgotha was a place of desolation. It held out no hope.
But that was then. She could not know that, two days later, everything would change. As it will for Irina and Miron, and as it will for you and me.
God our redeemer, who prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary
to be the mother of your Son:
grant that, as she looked for his coming as our saviour,
so we may be ready to greet him
when he comes again as our judge;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen
The Revd Adrian Leak is a retired Anglican priest, whose recent publications include a collection of essays, The Golden Calves of Jeroboam (Books, 11 December 2020); and his memoirs, After the Order of Melchizedek (Books, 8 July).