Botticelli in the context of "Pastiche"

Marian devotions are external pious practices directed to the person of Mary, mother of Jesus, by members of certain Christian traditions. They are performed in Catholicism, High Church Lutheranism, Anglo-Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy, but other Christian denominations mostly reject them.

Such devotional prayers may be accompanied by specific requests for Mary's intercession with God. There is significant diversity of form and structure in Marian devotions practiced by different groups of Christians. Orthodox Marian devotions are well-defined and closely linked to liturgy, while Roman Catholic practices are wide-ranging—they include multi-day prayers such as novenas, the celebration of canonical coronations granted by the Pope, the veneration of icons in Eastern Christianity, and pious acts which do not involve vocal prayers, such as the wearing of scapulars or maintaining a Mary garden.

Ad Caeli Reginam is an encyclical of Pope Pius XII, given at Rome, from St. Peter's Basilica, on the feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the eleventh day of October, 1954, towards the end of the Marian year, in the sixteenth year of his Pontificate. The encyclical is an important element of the Mariology of Pope Pius XII. It established the feast Queenship of Mary.

Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici (Italian: [loˈrɛntso de ˈmɛːditʃi]), known as Lorenzo the Magnificent (Italian: Lorenzo il Magnifico; 1 January 1449 – 8 April 1492), was an Italian statesman, the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. Lorenzo held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian Peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the golden age of Florence. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. On the foreign policy front, Lorenzo manifested a clear plan to stem the territorial ambitions of Pope Sixtus IV, in the name of the balance of the Italic League of 1454. For these reasons, Lorenzo was the subject of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478), in which his brother Giuliano was assassinated. The Peace of Lodi of 1454 that he supported among the various Italian states collapsed with his death. He is buried in the Medici Chapel in Florence.

The Gemäldegalerie (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈmɛːldəɡaləˌʁiː], lit. 'Painting Gallery') is an art museum in Berlin, Germany, and the museum where the main selection of paintings belonging to the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is displayed. It was first opened in 1830, and the current building was completed in 1998. It is located in the Kulturforum museum district west of Potsdamer Platz.

It holds one of the world's leading collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Its collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and Antonio Viviani.

Mary has been one of the major subjects of Western art for centuries. There is an enormous quantity of Marian art in the Catholic Church, covering both devotional subjects such as the Virgin and Child and a range of narrative subjects from the Life of the Virgin, often arranged in cycles. Most medieval painters, and from the Reformation to about 1800 most from Catholic countries, have produced works, including old masters such as Michelangelo and Botticelli.

Marian art forms part of the fabric of Catholic Marian culture through their emotional impact on her veneration. Images such as Our Lady of Guadalupe and the many artistic renditions of it as statues are not simply works of art but are a central element of the daily lives of the Mexican people. Both Hidalgo and Zapata flew Guadalupan flags and depictions of the Virgin of Guadalupe continue to remain a key unifying element in the Mexican nation. The study of Mary via the field of Mariology is thus inherently intertwined with Marian art.