The Annunciation is a panel-painting by the Early Netherlandish artist Hans Memling. It depicts the Annunciation as the archangel Gabriel's announces to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive and become the mother of Jesus, as described in the Gospel of Luke. The painting was executed in the 1480s and transferred to canvas from its original oak panel sometime after 1928. It is today held in the Robert Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The panel shows Mary in a domestic interior with two attendant angels. Gabriel is dressed in ecclesiastical robes, while a dove hovers above Mary, representing the Holy Spirit. It expands upon the Annunciation wing of Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Columba Altarpiece of . According to the art historian Maryan Ainsworth, the work is a "startlingly original image, rich in connotations for the viewer or worshiper".
The iconography focuses on the Virgin's purity. Her swoon foreshadows the Crucifixion of Jesus, and the panel emphasizes her role as mother, bride, and Queen of Heaven. The original frame survived until the 19th century and was inscribed with a date believed to be 1482; modern art historians have suggested that the number's final digit was a 9, which would give a date of 1489. In 1847, the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen described the panel as one of Memling's "finest and most original works".Sterling (1998), 81 In 1902, it was exhibited in Bruges at the Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges, after which it underwent cleaning and restoration. The banker Philip Lehman bought it in 1920 from the Radziwiłł family, in whose collection it might have been since the 16th century; Antoni Radziwiłł discovered it on a family estate in the early 19th century. At that time, it had been pierced through with an arrow and required restoration.
Description Subject
The Annunciation was a popular theme in European art,"The Annunciation". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved April 28, 2015. although a difficult scene to paint, because it depicts Mary's union with Christ as she becomes the tabernacle for the Word made flesh. The doctrine of Mary as Theotokos, the God-bearer, was affirmed in 431 at the Council of Ephesus; two decades later the Council of Chalcedon affirmed the doctrine of Incarnation – that Christ was of two natures (God and Man) – and Mary's perpetual virginity was affirmed at the Lateran Council of 631. In Byzantine art, Annunciation scenes depict the Virgin enthroned and dressed in royal regalia.Blum (1992), 52 In later centuries she was shown in enclosed spaces: the temple, the church, the garden.Blum (1992), 53
In Early Netherlandish art the Annunciation is typically set in contemporary domestic interiors, a motif and tradition established by Robert Campin, and followed by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Neither Campin nor van Eyck went so far as to set the scene in a bedchamber, although the motif is found in van der Weyden's Louvre Annunciation of c. 1435 and his Saint Columba Altarpiece of c. 1455, in which the Virgin kneels by the nuptial bed, rendered in red made from costly pigments. Memling's depiction of the scene is nearly identical to that in the Saint Columba Altarpiece.Snyder (1987), 38
Figures The archangel Gabriel appears before Mary to announce that she will bear the Son of God.De Montebello (1994), 353 He is shown standing in a three-quarter view, wearing a small jeweled diadem and dressed in vestments. He has a richly embroidered red-and-gold brocade cope, edged with a pattern of gray seraphim and wheels, over a white alb and amice. He holds his staff of office in one hand, and raises the other towards the Virgin.Blum (1992), 49 He bends his knees, honoring and acknowledging her as Mother of Christ and Queen of Heaven, and his feet are bare and positioned slightly behind hers.Blum (1992), 50
The Virgin is in a frontal view; directly behind her the red-curtained bed acts as a framing device, similar to the traditional canopy of honor or baldachin. Unlike in the work of Memling's predecessors, whose Virgins are garbed in heavily jeweled and costly robes, the plain white shift she wears beneath a blue mantle is minimally jeweled at the hem and at the open neckline. A purple underdress peeks out at her neck and wrists, indicating her royal status. Mary seems neither surprised nor fearful at the announcement; according to the art historian Shirley Neilsen Blum the scene is rendered with a great sense of naturalism and successfully depicts "the transformation of Mary from girl to God-bearer".
The Virgin holds an innovative and unusual position. She seems to be either rising or swooning as if having lost her balance, a divergence from her conventional seated or kneeling pose. Blum believes "one may search in vain in other Netherlandish Annunciation panels of the fifteenth century of a Virgin positioned as she is here".Blum (1992), 43 The art historian Penny Jolly suggests that the painting shows a birthing position, a motif with which van der Weyden experimented in his Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, where the Virgin's collapse results in a childbirth-like posture, and in his Descent from the Cross, which has Mary Magdalene bending and crouching – similar to the position Memling's Magdalene assumes in his Lamentation.Jolly (2014), 40, 57 Flanking the Virgin, and holding her, are two attendant angels. The one to the left lifts the Virgin's robe while the other gazes at the viewer, "soliciting our response", according to Ainsworth.Ainsworth (1998), 118 Both are small-statured, solemn, and, according to Blum, in mood "comparable to that of Gabriel".Blum (1992), 54 Other than the presence of the angels, Memling shows a typical upper-merchant-class 15th-century Flemish bedchamber.
Objects A dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovers inside a rainbow-hued circle of light directly above the Virgin's head. Its placement and size are unusual for art of the period. It is unlike anything found in van der Weyden, and is never repeated in Memling's work, but reminiscent of van Eyck's dove in the Ghent Altarpiece's Annunciation panel. Its shape is found in medallions hung above beds at that time, and thus seems in keeping with the domestic interior. Mary's left hand rests on an open prayer book, which she has propped open on a prie-dieu, with the letter "D" visible – perhaps for Deus tecum ("the Lord be with you"), according to Ainsworth. Blum speculates that the passage is from Isaiah 7:14, "Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son". A vase containing white lilies and a single blue iris is next to it on the floor.Blum (1992), 48
A curtain sack, commonly found on beds of the period, hangs in the central axis between Gabriel and the attendant angel.Blum (1992), 44 A sideboard beside the bed contains two types of candles and a flask of water standing in bright light falling from the window to the left. The floor is multi-colored tile-work, similar to that in van der Weyden's Saint Columba Altarpiece; Memling truncates the ceiling rafters in the mid-ground, at the end of the bed, with the floor extending into the foreground. Blum describes the effect as acting "like an open stage for the holy figures".Blum (1992), 55
Iconography The iconography is not overly labored, and Memling avoids extraneous symbolism. Many elements emphasize Mary's role as the Mother of God; the chamber is furnished with simple everyday objects that indicate her purity. The vase of lilies and the items on the sideboard are objects 15th-century viewers would have associated with her. White lilies were often used to signify her purity, while irises or sword lilies were used as metaphors for her suffering. Memling emphasizes symbols associated with her womb and virginity, "introduces two additional angelic priests, and floods the room with natural light, thereby rearranging the anecdotal to emphasize the doctrinal meaning". Charles Sterling describes the work as "one of the finest examples of Memling's ability to take a pictorial convention inherited from his predecessors and infuse it with a heightened sense of emotion and narrative complexity".
Light
From the 9th century Light became associated with Mary and the Incarnation. Millard Meiss notes that from the 12th century a common way to convey the conception was to compare light passing through glass to the passage of the Holy Spirit through the body of the Virgin.Meiss (1945), 177 Saint Bernard likened it to sunshine, explaining in this passage: "Just as the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window without damaging it, and pierces its solid form with imperceptible subtlety, neither hurting when entering nor destroying when emerging; thus the word of God, the splendor of the Father, entered the virgin chamber and then came forth from the closed womb."Meiss (1945), 176
Three objects on the bedside cabinet represent the Virgin's purity: the water flask, the candleholder, and the ropewick light. The light passing through the glass of the womb-shaped flask symbolizes her flesh, pierced by divine light; its clear and undisturbed water represents her purity at the moment of conception, a device found also in the earlier paintings as a metaphor of the Virgin's sanctity. The flask shows a reflection of the window's crossbar as a cross, a symbol of the Crucifixion – another small detail in which Memling "lays one translucent symbolic form upon another".
Light represented by candles was then often used to symbolise the Virgin and Christ; both Campin and van Eyck placed hearths or candles in their annunciation scenes.Meiss (1945), 175 The candleholder without a candle and the ropewick without flame symbolize the world before Christ's Nativity and the presence of his divine light, according to Ainsworth.
The challenge for painters of the Annunciation was how to visually represent the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, or Logos.Koslow (1989), 10 They often showed rays of light emanating from Gabriel or a nearby window entering Mary's body to depict the concept of Christ "who inhabited and passed through her body". The light rays might sometimes include an inscription,Blum (1992), 46 and were sometimes shown entering her ear, in the belief that it was thus the Word became flesh.
Memling did not depict the light as distinct rays, nor had Dieric Bouts's Getty Annunciation. Yet the room is bright, filled with sunlight, a fenestra incarnationis, which would have been an adequate symbol for the contemporary viewer.Blum (1992), 47 By the mid-15th century the Virgin is found depicted in a room or chamber near an open window to permit the passage of light.Meiss (1945), 178 Memling's room, with its window through which light streams, is a most "decorous sign of Mary's chastity", according to Blum. There are no word scrolls or banderoles to indicate the Virgin's acceptance, yet her consent is obvious through her pose, which seems, according to Sterling, both submissive and active.Sterling (1998), 83
Mother of Christ
The Virgin birth is indicated by the red bed and red womb-shaped curtain-sack. During the early 15th century hanging beds or curtain-sacks became symbols of the Incarnation, and "served to affirm [Christ's] humanity". Blum notes that at a time "when artists did not hesitate to depict the breast of the Virgin, Memling did not shun her womb". Christ's humanity was a source of fascination, and it was only in Netherlandish art that a solution was found for visualizing his embryonic state with curtain-sacks draped to suggest the shape of a womb.Koslow (1989), 11–12