CNA Staff, Oct 12, 2020 / 23:07 pm
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has announced the release of a Christmas stamp depicting an 18th-century Peruvian painting of the Blessed Mother and the Child Jesus.
Designed by Greg Breeding, the stamp is based on a painting of Our Lady of Guapulo currently located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The image, painted by an unknown artist in Cuzco, Peru, depicts a carving which Ecuadorian merchants commissioned in 1584 as a Spanish copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The statue was originally carved by sculptor Diego de Robles, but it was later destroyed in a fire in 1936, La Hora reported.
"Enrobed in a pyramidal gown speckled with jewels and holding a scepter woven with roses and leaves, a crowned Virgin Mary looks down at a similarly adorned Christ Child in her left arm. A red rosary ropes across the center of her dress and down to her right," the USPS wrote in its description of the stamp.