This week's new art offering in my Advent series of Madonna and Child images from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a ceramic sculpture by Mexican Artist Demetrio Garcia Aguilar, now on view in the image gallery of the Mexican Figurative Pottery page in the Schools of Sacred Art section. The second son of noted Oaxaca Pottery-maker Josefina Aguilar, Demetrio has created a striking image of an angelic Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, drawn from Chapter Twelve of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, where a woman crowned with stars and clothed in the sun gives birth to a man child, who is threatened by a dragon and taken up to the Throne of God. The reference is traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary and the birth of Christ, giving rise after the 17th Century Counter Reformation to a prototypical image in Roman Catholic art known as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. In Demetrio Aguilar's highly detailed figure grouping, the Baby Jesus looks as if he is being snatched up to heaven directly from his mother's womb, his billowing loin cloth, suggesting images of the Resurrection. Beneath the central figures, you can see a smaller crowned Madonna and Child, waving triumphal paper banners emblazoned with mystical, Eucharistic motifs, as they watch the Archangel Michael deliver the coup de grace with a flaming sword to the writhing seven-headed dragon of Revelation, a symbol of the victory of good over evil at the End of Time. (John Kohan)