A thread with some of my ink drawings of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Descriptions are liked below.


danielmitsui.com/00_pages/ave_m…

Tree of Jesse, ink drawing on paper. The Tree of Jesse is a visual elaboration of a prophecy of Isaiah: And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root, applied to the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

Before I describe my drawing of the Last Judgment, I will address something that comes up just about every time that I post this image online.

Someone will write to tell me that I have misspelled Dies Iræ. I am aware that this is how most people are used to seeing it spelled… However, in medieval Latin, certainly by the 13th century when Thomas of Celano wrote this sequence, the æ and œ diphthongs had largely disappeared, following changes in pronunciation. Because these were pronounced the same as e by itself, most scribes simply wrote e. If you…

The Sacred Heart itself, in its oldest depictions, is flat, simple and symmetrical. Later artists gave it more dimension and detail, but without making it accurate anatomically. Their result, I think, is artistically disastrous: something like a dripping strawberry with a tube… projecting from its top. Here, I have done the opposite: I started with the shape of a realistic heart, and reduced that to a stylized emblem.

The past few days, I have seen this image circulating on social media. Since some posts did not include identifying information, there has been confusion about what it depicts, who made it, and when it was made. If you see people asking about this image, please direct them here. I drew this picture in 2010. It depicts St. Michael the Archangel (not St. George), as a samurai. Specifically, it illustrates the Biblical verse Rev 12.7: And there was a great battle in heaven; Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels.

Five drawings I have made of St. Michael the Archangel:

First, as Psychopomp, ink drawing on calfskin. Full description here: buff.ly/3BgBaXO

Thank you, John. I will add to this list a few more living artists making excellent religious work. Perhaps others will do so as well...

https://twitter.com/HerreidJohn/status/1694510485880684573

Jed Gibbons, illuminated miniatures.

flickr.com/people/5016737…

A thread on my favorite typefaces: Those who follow my work know that I am intensely interested in lettering, calligraphy, and type design. Despite that, I spend relatively little time pondering questions of which typeface to use —

I received a commission to create a Catholic religious drawing in a Chinese style. When developing the concept for the project, I looked to one of the early missionaries to China, the Italian priest Matteo Ricci... Some time in the early 17th century, Ricci gifted four European prints to the Chinese publisher Cheng Dayue: two engravings by Anthony Wierix from a series illustrating the Passion and...

This ink drawing illustrates an incident early in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis’s father, a wealthy cloth merchant, was disturbed by his odd behavior and his giving away the family’s money. He appealed to the bishop of Assisi to discipline his son... According to Thomas of Celano:

"When he had been led before the bishop, Francis neither delayed nor explained himself, but simply stripped off his clothes and threw them aside, giving them back to his father. He did not even keep his trousers, but stood there in front of...

Bookplates of St. Francis of Assisi.

These are universal bookplates; anyone can write his or her name in the blank space and paste them into books to identify a personal library. They depict St. Francis of Assisi in a scene ironically relating to the ownership of... ...books. According to a medieval vita:

"When blessed Francis was sitting near a fire, warming himself, the same one spoke to him again about a psalter. And blessed Francis told him: After you have a psalter, you will desire and want to have a breviary; after you have a...

My patron wanted a drawing that combined Trinitarian and Sacred Heart imagery, and that included a great many saints and symbols of personal significance to her and her family.

It is formatted as a verso page in an illuminated manuscript. In the central image, I drew... the Holy Trinity in the traditional Gnadenstuhl (Throne of Mercy) arrangement: God the Father as the Ancient of Days holds the Crucified Christ, and the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove flies between Them. This was a common means of portraying the Holy Trinity in Gothic art.

St. Theodore of Canterbury, whose feast is today.

danielmitsui.com/00_pages/theod…

#inkdrawing St. Theodore of Canterbury, also known as St. Theodore of Tarsus, was born in Asia Minor in the early 7th century, and witnessed the wars between Sassanid Persia and the Byzantine Empire. He fled the conquests of the Rashidun Caliphate, lived in Constantinople and later Rome.

St. Hildegard of Bingen, ink drawing on goatskin.

danielmitsui.com/00_pages/hilde…

#hildegard Hildegard’s theology of beauty, best expressed in her epistle on music to the prelates of Mainz, has profoundly influenced my artwork. She proposed that delight in beauty is essentially a longing for the dimly remembered experience of Eden.

Some reflections on my very earliest artistic influences.

#1: Eyvind Earle... The image is from this article::

waltdisney.org/blog/eyvind-ea…