Holy card Anthony of Padua Fratelli Bonella Aurora

Italian holy card of Saint Anthony of Padua, issued by Fratelli Bonella of Milan in the Aurora series under number 26, bearing the FB anchor mark on the reverse. The card likely dates from the third quarter of the twentieth century, when Bonella's Aurora series, with its softened naturalistic imagery, became the standard for Italian parish cards. The reverse is blank. The card is in good condition.

Anthony is shown in the brown Franciscan habit with hood and corded girdle bearing a rosary, the Christ Child resting on his left arm and an open book held between the two figures. White lilies bloom in the foreground, the traditional attribute of purity that has accompanied him since the seventeenth century; the background opens onto a lightly wooded plain in pastel tones. Anthony of Padua, born in Lisbon in 1195 and died in Padua in 1231, ranks among the most widely invoked saints of Latin Christendom and is especially called upon to recover lost objects, a tradition rooted in a fourteenth-century account of a recovered psalter. Bonella's Aurora series carried this imagery from Italy into parishes across the Netherlands and Belgium.