Bernard of Clairvaux

If you’d like to see this engraving of the Virgin Mary spraying milk all over St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s face at a much higher resolution, it’s at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

It’s a blast, but Gadsby doesn’t identify any of the art she’s showing, and some of it—particularly the depictions of the Virgin Mary lactating a stream of milk across the room into the mouth of St. Bernard of Clairvaux—are not usually part of Art History 101.

The members of the order wore white robes with a distinctive red cross, embraced personal poverty and lived according to a regime codified by the great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux.

And we know that it made a lasting impression on other Bruges artists, because 16th-century copies exist of its central image: a Crucifixion scene with a passel of saints — John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Bernard of Clairvaux — and Crabbe himself in attendance.

In the nineteen-fifties, the brilliant Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who would become a friend and mentor to Berrigan, published a book about St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century Trappist.