{"id":30852,"date":"2017-05-11T16:32:56","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T23:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/?p=30852"},"modified":"2017-05-11T16:46:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T23:46:38","slug":"st-guinefort-the-greyhound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/11\/st-guinefort-the-greyhound\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Guinefort the Greyhound"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a rain day on the Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project. No work. Sigh. Boy, the fits and starts of this thing. Supposed to rain tomorrow, too, so we shall see.<\/p>\n

That at least gave me the chance to get my rusty self back to the art table.<\/p>\n

I was going to draw a dog-as-pope.<\/p>\n

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… although I thought this hound had more papal majesty.<\/p>\n

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While looking for a good canine pontiff, I — for reasons unknown — found a doggie bantito mixed in with the pope images.<\/p>\n

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Rather liked that guy. I suppose that image is politically incorrect, culturally insensitive, yada yada. But who’s going to argue with anybody who looks like that?<\/p>\n

Then … I ran across the medieval French legend<\/a> of St. Guinefort, the martyred greyhound. (Which probably began as an East Indian legend involving a martyred mongoose. And isn’t that just the way these things go?) <\/p>\n

St. Guinefort, the noble protector of children, unjustly martyred after his heroism, was not merely a legend, but apparently a localized cult within the Catholic church. Belief in the canine saint persisted into the twentieth century. The cult survived repeated condemnations by church authorities, but apparently only succumbed to world wars and perhaps just general modernization.<\/p>\n

But really. Who better to be a saint than a dog? If there’s a shred of heavenly justice, there’ll be more dogs than humans up there.<\/p>\n

Here’s another telling<\/a> of Guinefort’s story. This one by a nun with a sense of humor, but who Doesn’t Approve of unauthorized doggie sainthood.<\/p>\n

Moving right along …<\/p>\n

That quest also led me down a rabbit hole of other saintly trivia. Did you know that (the former, if you’re Roman Catholic) St. Christopher was believed to have had the head of a dog until his alleged encounter with Jesus? See? That’s Christopher, not Guinefort the Greyhound, below. Man, I’ll bet that sight scared the heck out of the Baby Jesus when he met (even though, as of the 1960s, he probably no longer did meet<\/a>, if you’re Roman Catholic) Christopher on the road.* <\/p>\n

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NOW we get to St. Guinefort, the dog picture.<\/p>\n

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I really only did this one to test out some new gold metallic acrylic paint I got last week. I wanted to see if it was really, really metallic. And by golly, as you see, it is. <\/p>\n

This being a folk legend, I treated it as folk art. I’m pleased with the design, the colors, the dead snake (see the story, linked), the gold paint, and the pose and character of the greyhound, but man it’s a headbanger for me trying to model shapes with light and shadow. The painting on the dog sucks. Oh well. I told myself I’d blog anything good enough to finish, so I’m blogging it.<\/p>\n

Mixed media (acrylic and graphite pencil) on a 6×8″ gessoed wooden plaque.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

*Or something like that. But most likely not; as Wikipedia notes, Christopher’s encounter with Jesus seems to have been borrowed from Jason — of Argonaut fame — and his similar good deed for the goddess Hera. These things do get complicated, don’t they?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a rain day on the Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project. No work. Sigh. Boy, the fits and starts of this thing. Supposed to rain tomorrow, too, so we shall see. That at least gave me the chance to get my rusty self back to the art table. I was going to draw a dog-as-pope. … although I thought this hound had more papal majesty. While looking for a good canine pontiff, I — for reasons unknown — found a doggie bantito mixed in with the pope images. Rather liked that guy. I suppose that image is politically…<\/p>\n

Continue readingSt. Guinefort the Greyhound<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-aesthetics","category-dogs-and-cats","category-religion","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30852"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30879,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30852\/revisions\/30879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}