« Wanting therefore, to confirm the rule, as his vision invited him to do, and to give a tighter wording to what was still only a rather confused jumble of Gospel sentences, he retired to a mountain with two companions< /strong> ( Leon and Bonizio) under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and there, fasting on bread and water, he dictated gradually and according to the inspirations he received from the Spirit of God, in his prayer. Once down, he entrusted it to the hands of his vicar, but a few days later he declared that he had lost it through negligence ; the saint then returned to his solitude, and immediately wrote a new rule, identical to the previous one, as if he had received every word of it from the mouth of God ; and he finally obtained confirmation of it, as he had desired, from the Lord Pope Honorius, then in the eighth year of his pontificate. »
(Major legend/chapter iv, 11)
Christ dictating the Rule to Saint Francis by Brother Luc (1614-1685)
« The Revolution French is in full swing. The churches, closed to worship, are stripped of all the objects of art which had accumulated there for often several centuries. Statues, furniture and altarpieces are removed. Some works are destroyed ; others sold to individuals ; others finally collected in vast deposits, before going, a few years later, to museums or being replaced in places of worship which have resumed their activity. It is in this context that two French brother priests, Philippe (1753-1833) and Louis-Joseph (1766-1848) Desjardins, having fled the Terror, reached Quebec and exercised various ministries there.
In 1802, the eldest returned to France, while maintaining a very strong link with the Church of Quebec. A very simple idea then arises in him: some of the paintings removed from French churches could have a second life in the churches of Quebec. He therefore bought a little less than two hundred paintings (mainly works from the 17th and 18th centuries) and shipped them, in 1816 and 1820 : the paintings were first sent from Brest to New York , then rolled and transported by sleigh to Quebec. Louis-Joseph then took care of restoring them and selling them to the parishes. This is how our Franciscan painting left the Récollets convent in Paris for the Museum of French Monuments, which museum sold it to a banker who himself gave it to Father Desjardins. Since then, it has been located in the Saint-Antoine-du-Tilly church, about fifty kilometers from Quebec. But this painting presents a particular case : in fact, its author, Brother Luc, himself spent a year in Quebec, in 1670, and he worked there both as a painter and as an architect. Brother Luc is therefore far from being unknown in New France. »
© < /span>Pierre Moracchini< span style="color: rgb(15, 20, 25);"> ( < /span>Director of the Franciscan School of Paris. Editor-in-chief of Franciscan Studies.) < span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">November 15, 2017
THE FABULOUS DESTINY OF THE ABBÉ DESJARDINS PAINTINGS
The MNBAQ presented in the summer of 2017 The fabulous destiny of the paintings of the Abbots Desjardins. This exhibition highlighted the bicentenary of the arrival in Canada of some 200 paintings initially executed for the churches of Paris during the 17th and 18th_1 1100000-0000-0000-0000-000000000111_centuries by renowned painters, seized during the French Revolution. These paintings were then collected by the clergyman Philippe-Jean-Louis Desjardins in order to be sent to Quebec to be sold in parishes and religious communities then in full expansion. A selection of 'around forty French paintings and around twenty Quebec copies testifying to missing French masterpieces but also to the practice of local artists was presented.
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