Holy Cards

Holy cards offer comfort, consolation, and encouragement to Catholics, who often carry these portable images of their favorite saints with them and use them in daily religious ritual. Given as remembrances at wakes and funerals, communions and confirmations, holy cards are also a widely popular—and highly collectible—form of folk art. This handsome volume, the only book available on the subject, is both a rich illustrated survey of this devotional art and a gallery of saints organized thematically along with brief biographies, attributes, and powers. Prophets and angels, disciples and evangelists, martyrs and hermits, visionaries and mystics are among the religious figures in Catholicism represented here—in exquisite turn-of-the-century depictions that are at times dramatic or disturbing, at times moving or comforting. Barbara Calamari and Sandra Di Pasqua, who also collaborated on Novena and Holy Places, explain the often enigmatic symbolism in these cards in a beautiful book that makes an ideal gift for first communion, confirmation, or graduation.