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The Pelican in Her Piety — bas-relief, full composition The Pelican in Her Piety — vertical detail of the mother bird at the breast The Pelican in Her Piety — vertical detail of feathering and young The Pelican in Her Piety — horizontal crop showing the full sculpted field The Pelican in Her Piety — vertical close detail of the relief surface
Christian

The Pelican in Her Piety

Placed in a Private Collection
Sculptural bas-relief of the Pelican vulning her breast
The mother bird in piety, feeding her young from her own blood
Restrained gold finish on dark ground
Sized for a private collection, library, or gallery wall
One-of-one work · Handcrafted in the Washington, DC region

The Pelican in Her Piety is one of the older sacred figures of the Western tradition. The mother bird turns to her own breast, opens it, and feeds her young with her own blood. The image carried weight in early Christian and Rosicrucian iconography long before it became a heraldic ornament, and it has not lost it.

Symbolism

The Pelican is first a Christian figure — the sacrificial Christ, the body opened, the life poured out, the children fed. The same image was carried into Rosicrucian iconography, where it appears in the 18° degree of the Rose Croix. (The name is older still: in alchemy the pelican is the closed vessel in which a substance circulates and feeds back upon itself until something purified emerges.)

This bas-relief carries the figure plainly. The wound is shown. The young are shown. The composition is not softened.

Materials and Finish

The work is built as a sculptural bas-relief on a stable substrate, hand-finished with restrained gold on the principal forms against a dark ground. The relief is registered for legibility — wing, breast, beak, young — at altar or wall distance. The surface is not polished to a mirror finish; it reads as a sculptural object.

Placement

The piece is sized for long-form display: a private collection, library, or gallery wall.