Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz’s Descent of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame de Liesse), is one of two castings made from an original bronze sculpture located in the Roman Catholic Church d’Assy, Haute Savoie, France. In 1960, Jane Blaffer Owen bought this cast for the Roofless Church. About the sculpture, Church of Scotland minister, former Warden of Iona Abbey and friend of Jane Owen, John Philip Newell wrote: “In the form of a dove the Spirit descends onto an abstract divine feminine form that opens to give birth. At one level, Lipchitz is pointing to the Jesus story, conceived by the Spirit in the womb of Mary. At another level he is pointing to the universe story. Everything is conceived by the Spirit in the womb of the cosmos. Everything is sacred.”

Lipchitz himself said of his sculpture, “My statue really represents a dove who has in his beak three parts of the sky which form a mantle from which the Virgin emerges, her hands generously opened for all humanity.” The dove’s eyes are open because, Lipchitz explained, “We see only with the eyes of the Spirit.” The eyes of the sacrificial lamb are closed and the Virgin Mary has no eyes at all because, in Lipchitz’s words, “The dove, or the Holy Spirit, alone sees.”

After escaping the Nazi regime, Lipchitz relocated from Lithuania to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. He later moved to New York. The second cast of this sculpture is in the Presbyterian Abbey of Iona, Scotland.

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