UNDER THE VEIL OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN: COLOR, 
SYMBOL, AND REVERENCE IN THE PRACTICE OF 
MARIAN ART 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
MARIELLE LEFAVE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A THESIS 
 
Presented to the Department of Art   
and the Robert D. Clark Honors College  
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Arts 
 
June 2022 
 
 
 
 
An Abstract of the Thesis of 
Marielle LeFave for the degree of Bachelor of Arts  
in the Department of Art to be taken June 2022 
 
 
Title:  Under the Veil of the Queen of Heaven: Color, Symbol, and Reverence in the 
Practice of Marian Art 
 
 
 
Approved:     Jovencio de la Paz, MFA    
                     Primary Thesis Advisor 
 
This thesis is a documentation of the artistic process and research methods of 
one young Catholic artist trying to understand the implications of the ritual context of 
veils and veiling through making veils in the tradition of Catholic veiling. Through this 
work, she researches art depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary, historical accounts of Mary 
and the cult of Mary in Christianity, art historical accounts of the veil in specific, 
Catholic art and art theory, and Catholic post-capitalist political and economic thought. 
She accounts for the complexity of synthesizing these ideas into a single set of six hand 
woven chapel veils made based on the Catholic liturgical calendar.  
Her work with these veils indicates the broader confluence of influences that an 
artist encounters and synthesizes and seeks to make that complexity more explicit. The 
artistic process is a process of reasoning that is unpredictable and fluid, even when it is 
constrained to a prompt or a material. This work shows that process laid bare for one 
artist as she works through the theoretical and practical aspects of her work.   
ii 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
I would like to thank Professors Jovencio de la Paz, Dr. Barbara Mossberg, and 
Sun You for their support of me in this artistic process with all its twists and turns.  All 
three of these wonderful mentors have taught me to think, draw, paint, and weave more 
effectively as I have searched for my own voice as an undergraduate artist. I am grateful 
to all of you for showing me pathways toward continuing in my growth, and your 
support of my vision. I will forever be grateful for the insights each of you have made 
possible for me and for every paper and art piece I have made at your direction, 
especially the ones I may not have liked at the time.  
I would like to express my gratitude to the St. Thomas More Newman Center 
that serves the students at the University of Oregon and all its staff and community for 
being a stable home for me to grow in faith and understanding during my time here.  
I would also like to thank my brother, Br. Anselm Dominic LeFave, my mentor 
in all things religious and fantasy. His zealous joy for divine Love and immense 
capacity for esoteric knowledge has long been an inspiration to me and was especially 
helpful on this thesis. I would like also to thank my mother, Kelly LeFave, who is my 
first and most honest critic, my most poetic and patient editor, and my most insightful 
spiritual director. Words cannot express my love and gratitude for this amazing woman.  
I would be a lesser woman without you all, and I am so grateful for your 
presence in my life and education.  
  
iii 
 
 
Table of Contents 
Introduction 5 
Chapter 1: Art History 8 
Chapter 2: The Artistic Research Process 19 
Chapter 3: Materials and Methods 26 
Bibliography 38 
 
  
iv 
 
 
Introduction 
Veiling. To think of putting a covering over my head as I step into a church 
strikes a certain fear into my heart. Am I imitating some horribly outmoded and 
subordinating social order that actively seeks my subjugation for no reason other than 
my gender, my femininity? Am I delusional to think that because women have covered 
their heads in sacred spaces, in Catholic churches, for much of recorded history, that I 
might find something here? Surely it is in some sense a lust for pious expression, an 
extraordinary scrupulousness, a blind need for rules and order to tell me the right way to 
live my life. Catholic women have not veiled since the middle of the last century. My 
mother barely remembers veiling as a young girl. What use could I have for this 
redundant cloth that covers my brown curls? And yet, the cloth calls to me. The flowing 
robes of the Virgin Mary, swirling and enveloping me in my own imagination.  
I was not taught to cover my hair in church. As a young girl at Catholic school, I 
was told, along with all the other children, to remove hats and hoods when walking into 
church as a sign of respect. I knelt in my red plaid skirt and white polo shirt and 
repeated the responses in English. I received communion in the palm of my left hand. I 
thought about power and clericalism and the parts of the Catechism I did not agree with. 
My friends debated the merits of Satanism and the backwardness of the Catholic 
church. I am, in many ways, a thoroughly modern young Catholic woman.  
And yet, when I prayed in high school and into college, I liked to put my hood 
up, to cover myself with a blanket or wrap myself in a coat. I cannot account for this 
impulse. I never liked the feeling I got from women who veiled in churches I went to. I 
certainly didn’t want to take vows as a religious sister, either. I never wanted the radical 
5 
 
 
traditionalist lifestyle that seemed to come with the veil. I didn’t want five children or a 
husband who wore an immaculate suit to Mass, didn’t want to spend my life as a 
caricature of a 1950s housewife. I didn’t even like the way those veils looked with their 
synthetic lace in complex floral patterns, ghostly and floating in stiff undulations on 
perfectly ordered hair.  
Catholic veiling has a unique origin among the Abrahamic religions. The only 
Biblical instruction about veiling comes from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in 
which he details the instructions for public worship and reads as follows:  
“I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain 
the traditions just as I handed them on to you. But I want you to 
understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the 
head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ. Any man who prays or 
prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, but any 
woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her 
head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. For if a 
woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is 
disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she 
should wear a veil. For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he 
is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of 
man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from 
man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the 
sake of man. For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol 
of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord 
woman is not independent of man or man is independent of woman.  For 
just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all 
things come from God. Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to 
pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that 
if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long 
hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. But if 
anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do 
the churches of God” (1 Corinthians 11:2-16). 
In many ways, this passage is vague and tangential, seeming to twist and turn on itself 
in explanation of the manifold relationships between men, women, and God. Man 
comes from woman and woman comes from man; the angels are invoked with no 
6 
 
 
apparent context. We are asked to “judge for yourselves.” As with most Biblical 
interpretation, there are many ways to read these words. The Church as an institution 
does not require women to cover their heads in Church, though she does not condemn 
the practice. I wanted to understand the realities of this practice in mind, body, and 
spirit.  
And so, I decided to make it a project to veil. I wanted to see this practice in its 
context and feel it in my body. I was drawn to veiling in my prayer, especially through 
my devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, so I started with her, my namesake and 
queen.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 1: Art History 
Christian tradition has a long history of imaging Mary in visual arts that spans 
centuries and continents. I decided to gather for myself a timeline of touchstone 
paintings and other images from which to draw inspiration and instruction. This is not a 
comprehensive list, nor does it encompass the many diverse styles and representations 
of Mary that have been made, even within the tradition of painting or oil painting in 
particular. When I started this process, I was interested in the historical styles of 
figurative depiction and the significance of color, but as I delved into the pieces, themes 
of historical dress and the archetypal feminine in Christian cosmology began to take 
precedence in my research.   
 “Our Lady with the Prophet” (Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome)  
Marian art started with the start of organized Christianity, in the catacombs. 
Images of the Mother of Christ were painted by unknown artists throughout the 
catacombs of southern Europe in the places where Christians would gather for Mass or 
for community out of sight of the watchful eye of the Roman Empire. Immediately, 
Marian art was made not just for personal enjoyment or aesthetic pleasure, but to be part 
of the ritual context of liturgy.  
8 
 
 
 “Our Lady of Vladimir” 1125 
In the early Middle Ages, religious art tended to be highly formal and stylized, 
with many surreal shifts in perspective and proportion. The focus on stylization was 
particularly strong in the Eastern Church, now know as Orthodox Christianity, and the 
tradition of iconography continues to have a particularly pronounced influence on 
Orthodox spirituality. Innovations in symbol and the focus on the symbolic meaning of 
everything in these paintings—composition, form, color, pattern, placement, etc.—
meant that these paintings took on their own kind of grammar and established certain 
patterns of recognition. Saints often held certain objects or were pictured in certain 
ways again and again so as to be recognizable to a general audience. Two colors began 
to be associated with Mary: red, which is present here in “Our Lady of Vladimir,” and 
blue, which would become Mary’s color, especially in the west.  
9 
 
 
  “Coronation of the Virgin” El Greco, 
1591 
In the late Renaissance, a new form emerged from the studied and realistic neo-
classicism of the High Renaissance. Mannerism, as it is now called by art historians, 
broke the careful forms of Michelangelo and Raphael into swirling and surreal 
depictions of both heaven and earth. El Greco was one of the most famous of these 
artists, and his distortions and melancholy have long been an inspiration to me. Though 
El Greco was revolutionary in his composition, he continued with the western tradition 
of dressing Mary in blue.  
10 
 
 
 “The Young Virgin” Francisco de Zurbarán, 1632-33 
Francisco de Zurbarán has two paintings of a young Mary from the seventeenth 
century that I wanted to include. According to Lesley Hazelton in her biography of 
Mary, our best dating suggests that Mary was around thirteen years old when she 
became pregnant with Jesus. Paintings of Mary as a young girl provide a more 
comprehensive view of Mary as a person.  
 “The Young Virgin Asleep” Francisco de Zurbarán, 1630-35 
11 
 
 
 “Virgin and Child” Elizabetta Sirani, 1663 
Elizabetta Sirani’s “Virgin and Child,” also from the seventeenth century, 
heralds a much more modern approach to Marian imagery. Sirani’s approach pulls 
Mary and Jesus into the contemporary era: they are a comfortable family, casual and 
close. The two figures smile at each other unself-consciously, as if they are at home or 
another domestic setting. This image pulls the sacred into the domestic, the mundane, 
the everyday. Far from the highly stylized images like “Our Lady of Vladimir,” Sirani’s 
work invites the viewer to recall family, friends, and companions who resemble the 
figures in the painting. This mother and child are immediate and recognizable rather 
than archetypically abstracted.  
 “La Madonnina” Roberto Ferruzzi, 1897 
Roberto Ferruzzi’s “La Madonnina” or “Our Lady of the Streets,” as it is also 
known, uses informal closeness to focus on the age and station of Mary as he brings her 
into the streets his contemporary context as a poor girl with an infant. Like Sirani, 
12 
 
 
Ferruzzi pulls Mary into a relatable scene that might connect with the viewer, to call to 
mind familiar memories and images. But by adding a perhaps more historically accurate 
age, Ferruzzi suggests not only an allyship of Mary and Jesus to the poor, but asks the 
viewer to see Mary in young, struggling mothers.  
 “Virgin and Child” Natalia Goncharova, 1911 
Natalia Goncharova’s “Virgin and Child” signals a return to stylization 
alongside the radical shifts in visual arts coming to the fore at the turn of the twentieth 
century. Goncharova, in line with the growing abstract art coming out of the avant-
garde art circles of Europe, uses flat, bright colors and highly stylized shapes with bold 
and graphic lines. Goncharova incorporates the hierarchical and symbolic language of 
iconography fluidly into the new stylings of the modern European art scene, bridging 
the gap between tradition and innovation, secular and sacred, expression and stricture.  
 
13 
 
 
 “Mary” and “Joseph” Evie Hone, Co. Tipperary, Ireland 
In the early twentieth century, reaction to increasing industrialization and 
urbanization consolidated in artistic movements focused on handmade, traditional 
production and the relationship between production, artistry, scale, and speed. Evie 
Hone, in this milieu, combined her cubist training with her faith as she became a 
stained-glass artist in the 1930s in Ireland. Her work can be seen today in churches and 
other buildings across Ireland and the United Kingdom. Like Goncharova, Hone 
incorporates ancient sensibilities of hierarchy, simplicity, and abstraction in her stained 
glass portrait of Mary. Her work is reminiscent of both medieval illuminated 
manuscripts and cubist painting. Her shapes are rounded and soft despite the rigid 
material she works with, and her colors are muted and earth-toned.  
14 
 
 
 “Mary In a Cloak” Lily Yeats, 1930-49 
Like Evie Hone, Lily Yeats was part of the Arts and Crafts reaction to 
industrialization. Yeats became particularly interested in traditional Irish craft—mainly 
embroidery—at a time when Ireland was fighting for independence from the British 
crown. Yeats’ work pulls reference from traditional imagery of Mary and new 
sensibilities of color into the slow, traditional medium of embroidery. Her blue becomes 
the central focus of her piece and covers the figure of Mary in a protective, warm 
embrace. Mary is mysterious, comforting, and traditional at the same time.  
  “Let it be done according to thy word and the 
word was made flesh” and “Stabat Mater” Adë Bethune, 1935 
15 
 
 
Adë Bethune, like the other modern artists I mentioned in this timeline, was 
responding to a world of industrialization and the new problems of industrialized labor 
and urbanization. Bethune was the illustrator for Dorothy Day’s radical Catholic 
newspaper, The Catholic Worker, for which these illustrations were produced. 
Bethune’s work is largely in black and white, made for cheap paper and printing 
methods. She works in an abstract, modern, graphic style, bringing Marian imagery and 
modern simplified forms together in an image of Mary.  
 
 “Madonna” Claudio Bravo, 1979 
Claudio Bravo’s “Madonna” has been part of my life for a long time. His 
hyperrealist style brings a near-photographic level of detail to his figures and 
landscapes. The odd landscape transports the viewer to an uncertain place where saints 
from different times (left to right: St. Sebastian, St. Francis, St. Agatha, St. Lucy) meet 
the Mother of God and the Child Jesus. Mary presides over the scene in the white of 
purity, looking calmly down on her sleeping Son. Bravo uses recognizable iconography 
to indicate the identity of his saints, in keeping with Christian image tradition. 
16 
 
 
 “The Red Magnificat” Br. Emmaus O’Herlihy, OSB, 2018 
Br. Emmaus O’Herlihy is a working artist and Benedictine monk whose work 
with the sacred body has been incredibly meaningful to me. His figures emerge from a 
nebulous mist, as if the viewer is peering through the veil, catching a glimpse of figures 
just outside the scope of this world. “The Red Magnificat” in particular also brings a 
political element into the contemplative setting of the piece. Br. O’Herlihy paints Mary 
as a young indigenous Canadian, and paints her red, the color used today to raise 
awareness for missing and murdered indigenous women in the US and Canada. Like 
“La Madonnina,” “The Red Magnificat” invites the viewer to consider the relationship 
between the Queen of Heaven and a young girl of an especially vulnerable population.    
 “Immaculatum Mariae Virginis III” José Luis Castrillo, 2020 
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 “Saint Mary Receiving Grace” José Luis Castrillo, 2021 
Finally, I will end with another working artist whose prolific hand is quite 
practiced in the language and movement of the image of Mary: José Luis Castrillo. 
Castrillo’s work is largely gestural, using large, energetic brushstrokes and exaggerated 
lighting. He uses the color blue liberally in his images of Mary, and often incorporates 
elements from Revelations typically tied to Mary, such as her crown of stars. Mary is a 
figure of power and of softness, and this paradox prominently and often appears in 
Castrillo’s work.  
The richness and diversity of these images of Mary bring together associations 
historical and contemporary, all clothed in swirling, draping, flowing veils. Mary 
embodies the veil, the filter through which the divine (Jesus) entered the corporeal 
world. Mary is talking to angels, she is a mother holding a new life, she mourns her 
child’s death, and she is crowned Queen of Heaven. The veil indicates her identity and 
conceals her visage, showing both who she is individually and concealing her 
individuality to show her ritual role. Many of these paintings even employ an abstracted 
style that provides another layer of veiling between the viewer and the subject. Even in 
seeing her, we see her though a very obvious filter.  
 
 
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Chapter 2: The Artistic Research Process 
With this foundation in Marian imagery, I began to think more broadly about the 
artistic process I was using in my inquiry into veiling. I work from a Christian, 
specifically Catholic Western European and American tradition, and I read theory in 
this tradition to set out more specifically and consciously the aesthetic sensibilities that 
flow from that tradition. Catholicism is a diverse religion full of individual, local, and 
cultural differences in its visual aesthetics. I tend to work most closely from my own 
heritage, from various European Catholic immigrant populations that settled in America 
in the mid to late 1800s. I do not exclude influences from outside this tradition, but I 
want to be transparent about who I am and with what stories I come to this project 
steeped in. I am a child of these people and ideas, and I always find it important to draw 
out the story around what I am participating in before I can properly convey what I have 
to say.  
In a similar vein, I would like also to bring in C.S. Lewis’s research approach 
laid out by Rachel Fulton Brown in Mary and the Art of Prayer: “For too long, our 
scholarship has privileged those who would look at devotion as something to be 
explained from the outside, rather than allowing ourselves to look along devotion to see 
what the devout might see” (Brown xxix). In my research as an artist, I find it 
compelling to look “along” the practices and histories I participate in, attempting to see 
beauty from the inside as Lewis suggests. This does not preclude my own critical lens, 
rather increasing the nuances I encounter, thus leading me to more in-depth analyses.  
I started with J. R. R. Tolkien, the famous fantasy author of Lord of the Rings. I 
looked to Tolkien in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” in which he outlines the function of 
19 
 
 
the fairy-tale in the human psyche and the implications of these functions on the artistic 
process of building what he calls a “secondary world.” Tolkien’s idea of world-
building, or an artist’s creation, flows from his understanding of Creation by an ultimate 
Artist or Creator, namely the Christian God. The artist, as made in imago Dei, (in the 
image of God,) wishes to create like God does. However, he cannot. He is human, not 
divine, and his creations are limited to the human realm. But within that human realm, 
he can build small “secondary worlds” that through his artistry can illuminate the real 
world with their strangenesses and similarities. The part of the artist is to do his best to 
illustrate his observation of reality through his media of choice, and in so doing make 
apprehensible his mode of understanding. This, he seeks to do with his mind, body, and 
soul, fulfilling his innate desire to imitate his Creator through “secondary” creation. 
Tolkien’s view of the artist is ever with me as I work through artistic problems, 
reminding me of both my limited creative power and the immensity of possibility 
available in whatever “secondary world” I might find myself creating.  
From Tolkien, I moved to Eugene McCarraher, who is a contemporary historian 
and writer. His recent book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became 
the Religion of Modernity, was helpful for me in putting Tolkien’s more spiritual artistic 
concerns in a political context. The Enchantments of Mammon traces the history of 
capitalist political thought through a sacramental, Romantic lens. McCarraher’s work on 
the Arts and Crafts movement was particularly compelling to me as it speaks directly to 
the liturgical and ritual aspects of craft and art objects. In fact, some of the artists from 
the movement viewed “handicraft as a ‘religious problem,’” an idea that came from a 
“belief that the fusion of beauty, pleasure, and character had been ordained by ‘a most 
20 
 
 
kind Providence’” (McCarraher 312-313). Fundamentally, this movement that rebelled 
against the mechanization of hand craft and sought to revitalize slower, more storied 
forms of manufacture recognized religious concerns at the heart of its struggle. The 
movement “depicted industrial work and technology as an evil liturgy, and they feared 
that the extension of human power over nature led to anomie, animosity, and violence” 
(McCarraher 312). Not only did this movement see industrialization as a spiritual 
problem, it saw industrial gestures as particular perversions of good and necessary 
ritual. The increasingly industrial technology fueled by capitalism became the ritual 
objects of capitalism, instructing its faithful in the theology of profit as surely as 
stained-glass windows in cathedrals instruct churchgoers in Bible stories.  
Inscribed in these heated and frantic warnings from the Arts and Crafts 
movement is a fundamental respect for the power of material culture as an opportunity 
for public reasoning. For as well as expressing the technology and philosophy by which 
they were produced, textiles from industrial machines express “the eternal desire for 
material beatitude: the body rescued and transfigured, not only from decay but also 
from the everyday doom of banality” (McCarraher 309). There are complex stories in 
every textile that express the basic human needs both for covering and for expression of 
ideas. This movement recognized the potential for co-optation that increasing 
industrialization would make traditional forms of folk expression vulnerable to and the 
power that these new technologies would have over the people who interact with them 
or their products. In their concern over this power, the Arts and Crafts thinkers 
maintained an “ancient religious conviction that beauty is a sign of metaphysical 
enchantment, a countenance of the transcendent” (McCarraher 309). If beauty can be 
21 
 
 
co-opted to serve industrial aims, artistic beauty can change from organic enchantment 
to mechanical hypnosis that ultimately works to serve the ecosystem of capitalism 
rather than to serve human flourishing. McCarraher argues that we are living in the 
aftermath of this particular co-optation, where the  
“results are, by now, depressingly familiar: the greatest concentration of 
wealth among the top 1 percent since the early twentieth century; 
stagnant real wages for the past three decades, resulting in increased 
reliance on debt for health care, housing, and education; precarious 
employment, diminishing benefits, and shabbier working conditions; the 
potential elimination of whole classes of employment by automated 
production technology; and intensifying pressure for productivity on 
workers reminded every day of their utter dispensability” (McCarraher 
664).  
Now, from within this world led by technological machinery rather than human hearts, 
we must re-organize ourselves to understand beauty in the face of immanent destruction 
and manufactured scarcity we have achieved through extractive industrial processes 
driven by the theological doctrines of capitalist profit structures and material culture. In 
this thesis, I was interested in working with the slow hand-craft of weaving to see how 
this process could form my work toward the perfectly innocent beauty Mary represents, 
even in this increasingly mechanized world. 
With this political context, I returned to the Catholic tradition of Marian art to 
try to integrate and understand these ideas into the spiritual and material concerns of my 
thesis in specific. Returning to Paul’s description of the ritual laws for veiling, I 
remembered the line, “For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on 
her head, because of the angels.” (1 Corinthians 11:10). The content of this symbol is 
particularly powerful in the ritual context and brings out what I find most particularly 
interesting in this passage: the ritual setting of veiling.  Katherine Osenga echoes this 
22 
 
 
same idea in her definitive study of Marian veils in art history: “In Christianity, the 
veiling of women was required only in prayer, and only custom, not religious practice 
required women to be veiled in public” (Osenga 45). Paul asks women to veil not for 
the common reasons we might assume as modern readers, but for ritual, archetypal 
reasons intrinsic to the ritual spaces the veiling takes place in. Women are not asked to 
cover their heads because they are inferior or because their bodies might tempt 
someone to sin. They are asked to cover their heads to indicate their status as 
feminine, to assert their selfhood through gender in its archetypal, ritual context. The 
veil is a declaration of femininity as it relates to masculinity, femininity as it relates to 
femininity, femininity as it relates to angels, to Christ, to God. This statement is only 
required in the ritual context because it serves a particular instructive function as part 
of the ritual. Outside the ritual, other concerns prevail and no demand is made to veil.  
Mary, as the most prominent woman in Christian tradition, has a complex and 
instructive relationship to her veil. Her Veil: The Story of the Marian Veil in Art History 
from the Catacombs up until the Reformation by Katherine Osenga traces this 
relationship through art history. Osenga remarks on the uniqueness of Christian veiling 
in comparison to Islamic and Jewish traditions of veiling, which primarily are 
concerned with material modesty, through Mary’s veil in Byzantine art where “the 
Marian veil expands to become a symbol of her motherhood and her protective power, 
indeed a power that could defeat the Islamic Empire” (Osenga 46). Mary’s veil is a 
symbol of her various stations, encompassing mother, protectress, and raw power. The 
veil as a covering is used not to hide, but to show a particular reality about this most 
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extraordinary woman: that she was the Mother of God, and thus spiritually powerful. 
Her spiritual power extended into her veil for her devotees of the Middle Ages who first 
started to venerate relics of her veil in churches. These relics were not venerated for 
their inherent qualities of cloth, but because of the person who wore the veil (Osenga 
65). Relics of this sort (objects handled consistently by a saint, such as clothing) are 
called second-class relics. They are second only to parts of a saint’s actual body and are 
venerated in devotion to the spirit of God that is expressed through the saint. Relics of 
Mary are particularly venerated because Mary’s position is above that of other saints, 
she having carried God in her womb. This raw spiritual power of Mary has been 
tempered by various cultural and political projects over the course of Christian history, 
leaving many with the idea that Mary is a quiet, meek woman without much of her own 
agency. Osenga credits the Counter-Reformation with this image in Catholic spaces, 
saying that really, “Mary was a mixture of two realities: heaven and earth, power and 
humility. She is not one or the other, but both at the same time, and this is why she was, 
and is, so popular and so necessary for women” (Osenga 109). Mary and her veil are 
intrinsically linked, and her exalted position as the Mother of God provides an example 
in the tradition of the height of the archetypal feminine that the veil represents.  
A veil used for prayer, in a Catholic worldview, would be considered a 
sacramental. Sacramentals are objects used for particular purpose in ritual, both formal 
and casual, that orient the mind to God. In theory, this could be almost any object, 
though traditionally objects like rosaries, veils, holy medals, and scapulars have become 
the most popular and obvious kinds of sacramentals. In its function as a sacramental, a 
veil becomes not just an object, but part of the world around us that can, to use a crude 
24 
 
 
analogy, “conduct” grace. Humans are bound by material; our flesh is part of who we 
are and because of this we need to construct physical things to even begin to understand 
abstractions and divine movements. So, the veil that I wanted to make would need to 
have not only beauty to the weaver’s eye in the pattern of warp and weft, in the stiffness 
or flowing movement of drape, but to have the beauty of functionality as all 
sacramentals and ritual objects have. Intrinsic to sacramentality is a reflection of the 
abundance of nature that is opposed to the modern construction of a world of scarcity in 
which we are all on the brink of extinction through climate change, wage stagnation and 
the accumulation of un-disposable trash objects. As McCarraher writes, nature “is not a 
stingy and punitive antagonist, but rather a fruitful, ever-evolving habitat, open to the 
rational and reactive participation of humanity in its manifold generosity” (675-676). 
These material concerns are also spiritual and political. They involve the whole of 
human experience, as does all spiritual ritual. There is, perhaps, an aura to objects 
touched by ritual. These objects are kept safe, they are treated alternately as utilitarian 
and precious; they are moved intentionally to reflect meaning. My veils were to become 
ritual objects rather than art pieces for a gallery and so I wanted to understand how my 
artistic decisions needed to be made in line with that outcome.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 3: Materials and Methods 
I began my research in the painting studio. I knew I wanted to work in weaving, 
but I first had to learn a bit more about how to weave, so I started where I had more 
reference points of technique. I was just getting familiar with oil paints as a medium, 
and I find painting to be a great space for imagination, especially in color. I was 
learning that Mary is traditionally depicted in two colors in the European artistic 
tradition I was looking to: blue and red. In western Europe, she is generally wearing a 
pink robe and a blue mantle while in eastern Europe her mantle is red. Having western 
European familial ties, I was a little more unfamiliar with the red color and so decided 
to explore it in a depiction of Our Lady of Sorrows. Our Lady of Sorrows is a particular 
devotion to Mary in her grief following her Son’s death. I pictured her with the 
traditional seven swords piercing her heart and the words of the “Salve Regina,” a well-
known traditional prayer. This painting was an exercise in understanding the image 
tradition through participation. I started seeing Mary in red, the color of blood, of birth, 
and of martyrdom. This image was foundational to my continued understanding of this 
project.  
After this painting, I did an ethnographic study of the practice of Eucharistic 
Adoration, during which time I attended Adoration once a week for a couple of months. 
Adoration is a traditional prayer practice of silent prayer before the Eucharist that is 
generally done for approximately an hour. During these sessions, I offered my hands to 
Jesus and Mary, hoping for divine help in understanding how to move forward with the 
project. I began to pray before the Marian altar most Sundays after Mass, just basking in 
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her gaze from the Byzantine-style icon mounted above the altar. I was praying for 
guidance, unsure of how to proceed.  
I learned to weave, throwing the shuttle through treadle sequences for a whole 
term, just trying to understand the movement of thread in relation to the image of Mary 
herself spinning and weaving that has hundreds of variations in word and brushstroke 
throughout history. I had no idea how I could possibly translate these ideas into cloth.  
Jovencio de la Paz, my thesis advisor, suggested that I look closely at the color 
blue, the color traditionally associated with Mary. I made a playlist of songs about 
blueness. I went for walks and listened to this. I bought blue thread. I bought blue paint. 
I made an entirely blue and purple painting. I knit blue squares. Finally, I decided to 
make myself a tapestry loom out of the back of a canvas and a box of nails. I made a 
small tapestry of Mary on this that I was completely embarrassed to have shown to 
anyone. I was really stuck.  
Then Ash Wednesday began looming in the distance and I started to think about 
my Lenten discipline. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the late winter fasting 
season that precedes Easter. I thought about making a commitment to veil at Mass. I did 
not want to do this because of the social awkwardness of the gesture, but a friend asked 
me about what I was doing for Lent and I felt I had to commit. It popped into my mind 
that veiling used the grammar that I had been learning in my weaving class and showed 
the image of Mary not in the cloth itself, but in the woman who wears the cloth. That 
was certainly interesting to me.  
My first time walking into Mass with a scarf wrapped over my head was 
overwhelming. Ash Wednesday Mass was packed and I felt extremely awkward. I 
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couldn’t leave fast enough when Mass ended. The longer I did it, the better it was, 
especially when I dug up an old bandana that stayed put when I moved my head. I 
noticed, as I often do, that putting a cloth over my head changes the way that I pray. I 
think it makes me feel more connected to my interior experience in some way, focusing 
me on my own connection to the divine, almost honing my perception in that direction. 
If I veil in prayer, I normally do it alone, so it was weird to have that perceptive change 
as I prayed with other people.  
Halfway through Lent, I went down to Berkely, California to visit my brother, 
Br. Anselm Dominic, who is a Dominican religious brother in seminary to become a 
priest. He was very supportive of my Lenten experiment in veiling and together we 
reasoned through the chapter in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians where veiling is 
mentioned with the help of the biblical glosses he studies. Our conversation gave me a 
starting point for understanding the unique position of Christian feminine veiling as a 
practice for ritual rather than daily life and the context of veiling for men, women, and 
objects in Christian ritual. Around this time, I also re-discovered my devotion to the 
apparition of Our Lady Untier of Knots and began wearing a holy medal of this 
apparition of Mary in the studio, hoping that Mary who unties knots of worry and fear 
might also help me as a weaver with knots of a much more material aspect.  
I came back to Eugene with new insights and ready to start my project. Because 
I now understood veiling as primarily a ritual gesture, I wanted to place my veils 
specifically in a ritual context. I chose to make six veils that correspond to the major 
seasons of the Catholic liturgical year. The liturgical year starts in late fall with Advent, 
moving, in order through the seasons of Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter and 
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Ordinary Time. Each of these seasons is assigned a color which is used throughout the 
season in altar cloths, vestments, and other church decoration. For Ordinary Time the 
color is green, for Advent and Lent the color is purple, and for Christmas and Easter the 
colors are white and gold. Green gives Ordinary Time the connotation of growth, and 
regularity. Purple, the color of wealth, is given to the seasons of fasting, and white and 
gold, or purity and glory, are given to the seasons of rejoicing and celebration.  
Because these color groupings have roughly one fall/winter and one 
spring/summer season, I decided to make two veils for each color, one in wool and one 
in cotton. Each color would also use the same weave structure in both materials. Built 
into this consideration was the comparison of material and the weave structures across 
materials. I wanted the veils to reflect the liturgical season they were made for, to 
weave the resonance of the season into the structure of the fabric, so I was very careful 
with my planning for each veil. Generally, I wanted a sense of permeability and 
delicacy. In conversation with Jovencio, I settled on a gauze spacing to mimic the 
properties of lace without the direct connotation of wealth or mass-production. The 
spacing would create textiles with large gaps between threads that also retained enough 
structure to serve as a functional garment, bringing to the fore the tension between 
transparency and opacity a veil indicates.  
Within this spacing limit, I was able to work with different weave structures to 
create different surface textures for each pair of seasons that spoke to the ritual 
character of each. For Ordinary Time, I chose a simple twill structure. The twill I chose 
was a very basic, progressive twill similar to that often used in the construction of utility 
fabrics like denim, but through the increase of spacing, still acted as a gauze. Ordinary 
29 
 
 
Time, in Catholic liturgy, is the time to read the preaching of Jesus during His active 
ministry as a travelling preacher. Rather than a specific time of preparation or of 
celebration, Ordinary Time is a time of balance. The twill I chose is a very balanced 
weave structure, and one with a direction. The sequence of threads creates diagonal 
lines across the fabric that seem to record the passage of time, just as the recalling of the 
Gospel in Ordinary Time emphasizes the sequential passage of time in the life of Jesus, 
and in our lives by implication. Similarly, because this season is a season of balance, I 
have always found it somewhat utilitarian and simple in its aesthetics. For this reason, I 
decided to make these veils the smallest of the six, intending that they be worn kerchief-
style to tie up the hair as if in work. In a season that emphasizes the radical teachings of 
an itinerant preacher, I thought that the aesthetics of simplicity and work made the most 
sense.  
For Lent and Advent, the purple seasons of fasting, I chose the simplest weave 
structure: plain weave. This weave structure is strong and ancient and records a 
simplicity of thought in the mind of the weaver. Weaving plain weave is a meditative, 
contemplative kind of weaving that leaves a lot of room for burgeoning understanding 
in its simplicity. I finished these with a simple macrame tie structure in the tassels, 
allowing the pattern of knots to bring some ceremony to the simplicity of the form. I 
allowed these veils to remain long and wide. Advent and Lent are times of fasting and 
of prayer, and the enveloping cloth allows for a more complete immersion in the 
physical aid to prayer that veils can provide. It also, along with the color purple, points 
to a seeming contradiction at the heart of these seasons. In the midst of fasting, the 
extravagance of long and lavishly dyed textiles dedicated to ritual embody the spirit of 
30 
 
 
generosity and discipline intrinsic to the season. Advent and Lent are about self-denial 
for the sake of personal spiritual growth, solidarity with others, and praise of God. 
These veils envelop the wearer in the midst of that desert.  
For Christmas and Easter, the white and gold seasons of high ritual and feasting, 
I chose a point twill. Point twills are used to make diamond and triangular patterns, or 
sometimes stars. The structure I chose was a complex movement of doubles and singles 
with long floating threads that extend over the surface of the fabric. These are mostly in 
white, with interspersed stripes of six gold threads. These textiles have a lot of 
movement, almost jumping in their celebratory joy. The intricacy extends to the 
finishing, which I did in combined techniques of crochet, macrame, and braiding. These 
last veils are long and intricate, celebrating the complexity and extravagance of the 
season and inviting the excited movement of feasting time.  
As a set, these six veils cover a liturgical year of ritual. The gesture of wearing a 
veil in a ritual context is extended not only out to the ritual space from the wearer, but 
into the structure of the cloth itself. So, the ritual space now apparently includes not 
only the space of the ritual, but the surface area of the textiles on the bodies of the 
people, as it always has. These enacted stories told in ritual, in gesture and in movement 
are recorded in thread. Weaving has always been a way of computing information, and 
in this way the record becomes again part of the ritual itself.  
 
 
 
 
31 
 
 
Green cotton veil for the 
season of Ordinary Time. 
32 
 
 
Green wool veil for the 
season of Ordinary 
Time. 
33 
 
 
Purple wool veil for 
seasons of Advent 
and Lent. 
34 
 
 
Purple cotton veil for 
the seasons of Advent 
and Lent. 
35 
 
 
White and gold cotton 
veil for Christmas and 
Easter season. 
36 
 
 
White wool and gold 
cotton veil for Christmas 
and Easter season. 
 
37 
 
 
Bibliography 
Works Cited 
Brown, Rachel Fulton. Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in 
Medieval Christian Life and Thought. Columbia University Press, 2017. 
Hazelton, Lesley. Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother. 
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004. 
McCarraher, Eugene. The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the 
Religion of Modernity. Harvard University Press, 2019. 
Osenga, Katherine Anne. Her Veil: The Story of the Marian Veil in Art History from the 
Catacombs up until the Reformation. 2009. Graduate Theological Union, PhD 
dissertation.  
Tolkien, J. R. R. "On Fairy Stories." Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Oxford 
University Press, 1947. 
Works Consulted 
Finlay, Victoria. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. 2004 Random House Trade 
Paperback ed., Random House, 2002. 
Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, 
Paulist Press, 1990. 
Jarrett, Bede. Social Theories of the Middle Ages. 1926, Angelico Press, 2012. 
Rudy, Kathryn M, and Barbara Baert, editors. Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles 
and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages. Medieval Church Studies, vol. 
12, Brepols Publishers, 2007.  
 
 
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