No. 48 — made once
Anunciação
75 pounds
Buy this piece
There is one. When it is bought, this page stays as its record.
Continue to secure payment- Tracked UK delivery included
- Repairs by the maker
- 14-day returns
- Premium packaging
Details
- Reference
- cora-0048
- Construction
- Wire-linked by hand — every bead turned onto its own eye-pin and closed
Delivery
Tracked UK delivery is included in the price. UK law applies to your order, and we pay any import fees ourselves wherever we are permitted to prepay them; where we are not, the carrier will collect them from you on delivery. Every piece arrives in a linen pouch inside premium packaging. See theshipping and returns pagefor handling and transit times.
Returns and repair
Fourteen days to return it, and repairs done by the maker herself — because every link is turned and closed by hand, a single link can be reopened and repaired without disturbing the rest of the strand.
And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.
About this piece
Anunciação is the moment the whole thing turns on: a girl alone in a room, and an answer given out loud. The run is a soft clouded blue, the colour of the sky over Contenças in the hour before the heat, broken twice by something darker, and the small standing figure at the centre is warm against it. It runs cool through the fingers and is slower to tell than it looks.
Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire link and closed by hand. These beads are larger than most and the links between them have to be turned wider to match, which is what makes the whole piece sit heavier. Made once, and not made again.
Pale blue, and the Annunciation
Blue is not one of the four colours of the Roman calendar — that is white, green, violet and red — but it has belonged to Our Lady in the popular imagination for so long that it may as well be. In Portugal and Spain the privilege is more than sentiment: certain Marian feasts have carried a licence for blue for centuries. A blue piece is understood immediately by anybody who grew up with this, and it needs no explaining at all.
This particular blue is soft and clouded rather than bright, the colour of the sky over Contenças in the hour before the heat arrives, when there is still some haze in it. It is a colour that reads as early rather than as decorative. Against it, the warm-toned figure at the centre and the two darker notes low in the run are the only strong marks on the whole piece, and they are placed where a thumb finds them.
The single piece in this group is named for the Annunciation — the moment a girl alone in a room is asked something and answers out loud. That is the scene the whole rest of it depends on, and it is a quiet scene rather than a triumphant one, which is the right register for this colour. The beads are larger than most on the bench and the links between them are turned wider to match, so the run sits heavier and moves more slowly through the fingers than its pallor suggests. It is not a fast piece to tell, and it was not meant to be.
Choose blue if you want something Marian that is not obvious about it. A white piece with a blue figure announces itself; this one waits to be noticed. It is also the easiest of the light-coloured pieces to live with day to day, because a clouded blue does not show handling the way an almost-white run does.
Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire link and closed by hand, over the better part of a day.
Care and blessing
Your rosary arrives unblessed. A blessing is given freely by a priest and costs nothing — it is not ours to sell, and it never will be.
What you have paid for is the making, and the hours it took.