Lifelike, motionless, serene – yet slightly uncanny, not of this world. One’s first sight of a “sleeping virgin” sculpture in the incense-filled gloom of one of Mallorca’s beautiful churches can come as quite a shock.
Every year in mid-August, churches display with considerable flourish their images of the Virgin Mary lying on her deathbed, or llit, in a set piece known as the Dormition of the Virgin. That’s a nice way of saying she’s dead. But not for long! Shortly after she “fell asleep”, Catholic dogma and broader Christian tradition have it that she was taken up, body and soul, into heaven where she was resurrected. This is the Feast of the Assumption, which falls every year on August 15.
Though some traditions maintain she was still alive when taken up, most Catholic and Orthodox Christians understand that, like her son Jesus, she underwent a physical earthly death of the body before going to her celestial abode. For Mallorcans, she’s pretty much deceased as on this day she is referred to as the dead mother of God, or “Mare de Déu morta”.
This year, island churches will be displaying 78 sleeping virgins, with 20 in Palma alone, says Gabriel Carrió who’s coordinating the events. Virgins will be displayed from August 24 to August 22, “although each church is free to decide whether to keep its display open during the weekends before and after.”
For Carrió, who oversees the displays on behalf of the island administration and the diocese, “the most spectacular are those in the Cathedral and La Concepció in Palma and the sculpture in the parish church of Muro.”
Also well worth seeing is the “floating” virgin at the church of Sagrats Cors in Palma, lovingly reinterpreted by US artist Natasha Zupan. This virgin hovers many meters above the viewer, suspended from the vaulted ceiling, her almost liquid-like celestial bedclothes cascading down.
“I wanted to make her beautiful,” Zupan revealed. “Beauty gives us hope and elevates the soul”. In a novel twist, this virgin’s bed is not a splendid Baroque piece but a more prosaic evacuation stretcher. Zupan says she wanted to underscore “the idea of protection, of rescue, of recovering hope, and I wanted to rescue a little bit of beauty and hope”.
“More than ever, we need hope and to believe there’s something up there, above us.” And here in this church, that is literally, spectacularly, and physically the case.
