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..Vintage Holy Card Church Prayer Miniature Mini Tiny Devotional Vinzenz SaintVery pretty fine holy prayer card. It is a miniature work of art.Please examine all of our high resolution, supersize photos for exact condition and detail.Please consider how wonderful this would look in a frame, or giving it as a thoughtful gift.
Measures: Approx. 2.5\" tall.
Condition: Has creases at the top and bottom.Says in German: \"Church Prayer\" \"With church print permission\"
What are Holy cards?
In the Christian tradition, holy cards or prayer cards are small, devotional pictures for the use of the faithful. They usually depict a religious scene or a saint in an image about the size of a playing card. They range in age and are highly collectible.The first holy cards were sold to pilgrims as a souvenir of having visited a shrine. The oldest such holy card is a picture of St. Christopher dating from about 1425. These were not really cards, but rather pictures printed on inexpensive paper. Since they were easily torn or destroyed, very few medieval holy cards have survived.
The golden age of holy cards came in the 19th century, when printers in Austria, Belgium, Germany and France began to mass produce holy cards of very high quality.
Many of these printers used chromolithography, a complicated, time-consuming method of printing in which an image goes through the press many times, with a new color added to the image each time it passes through the machine.
The beautifully colored holy cards that emerged at the end of this process are still admired today as miniature works of art. One of the finest printers of chromolithographic holy cards, the Society of St. Augustine in Bruges, Belgium, turned out hundreds of different designs ranging from scenes from the life of Jesus and Mary to images of individual saints and pictures of important relics.
Chromolithography is no longer cost-effective. Many of the great European holy-card publishers have gone out of business. Yet those gorgeous antique holy cards have not vanished More in Store!
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