Einsiedeln Abbey is a Benedictine monastery dedicated to Our Lady of the Hermits and located in the village of Einsiedeln, twenty miles southeast of Zurich. According to 9th and 14th-century sources, the hermit St Meinrad (d.861) was especially devoted to the Virgin Mary and was given a miracle-working statue of the Virgin and Child by Abbess Hildegard of Zurich around which he built a chapel. Following his murder by two robbers in pursuit of the ‘great treasure’ he was said to guard, a church was built over this chapel. The new church was dedicated but not the chapel. In 948 Conrad of Constance was praying in the chapel when he witnessed Christ and the angels performing the dedication rites. A papal bull of 966 allowed the celebration of the anniversary of this miracle and granted indulgences for pilgrimage to the shrine. Meinrad’s chapel was destroyed by revolutionary French troops in 1798 and the monastery supressed. The monks fled with their treasured Madonna. They were able to return in 1801/2 and the community’s security was assured by the new constitution granted to Switzerland by Napoleon in 1803. The shrine was rebuilt in 1816, an event commemorated in this print which may have been published to raise funds for the rebuilding.

The new shrine, which still serves as the Abbey’s Lady Chapel housing the statue, is depicted standing on the chequered pavement of the Abbey, framed within an elaborate cartouche of rococo ornament. A nimbus of rays surrounds the building, echoing the rays and lightning bolts issuing from the figure of the Virgin in glory above. The chapel building is presented as symbolically corresponding to the figure of the Virgin, which itself symbolises both the monastic community and the wider Church. In small vignettes, two pilgrims can be seen approaching from the left and the two robbers from the legend fleeing to the right, pursued by Meinrad’s two pet crows whose loud denunciations led to the murderers’ apprehension. In the foreground, the body of the saint lies as it was discovered, with lighted candles placed by angels at his head and feet. The saint’s martyrdom by the robbers is polemically correlated with the shrine’s desecration by the revolutionaries.

The coloured papers and metal foils adorning the figure of the Virgin and the façade of the chapel imitate the richly embroidered and bejewelled costumes in which the real statue, a black Madonna, is vested and the relief panels set into the black marble façade of the real chapel. This was also a way of adding colour to an image before the widespread availability of colour printing. The reflective metal foils suggest that the print was designed to be seen by the light of votive candles, treated as a domestic cult image in its own right as well as a souvenir of the pilgrimage.