- published: 05 Oct 2014
- views: 8590
An aureola or aureole (diminutive of Latin aurea, "golden") is the radiance of luminous cloud which, in paintings of sacred personages, surrounds the whole figure. In the earliest periods of Christian art it was confined to the figures of the persons of the Christian Godhead, but it was afterwards extended to the Virgin Mary and to several of the saints.
The aureola, when enveloping the whole body, generally appears oval or elliptical in form, but occasionally depicted as circular, vesica piscis, or quatrefoil. When it appears merely as a luminous disk round the head, it is called specifically a halo or nimbus, while the combination of nimbus and aureole is called a glory. The strict distinction between nimbus and aureole is not commonly maintained, and the latter term is most frequently used to denote the radiance round the heads of saints, angels or Persons of the Trinity.
This is not to be confused with the specific motif in art of the Infant Jesus appearing to be a source of light in a Nativity scene. These depictions derive directly from the accounts given by Saint Bridget of Sweden of her visions, in which she describes seeing this.
The wind blows through a broken window
Bringing the leaves of autumn inside
As I'm sitting here trying to catch a thought
And try somehow not to cry
It should be easy to start
But day after day it's getting harder
The walls are cracking and it's cold in here
Water comes through the ceiling
But I don't mind
Past are the days when the rays of sun still
Shone to this place forlorn
And this share memory is really painfull enough
To wish they'd never have been
And I'm riding high to freezing atmosphere
Above the lonely clouds
And I will never return
Never coming back for I'm no more
Like brothers we walked the miles through
Unholy land of alienation
Until the dew settled down in the forest
We saw the faces of the dead
I'd never seen what's wrong with me inside