Picture of the Day: Simone Martini’s The Annunciation
Simone Martini (1284-1344) The Annunciation – Uffizi Gallery, Florence
When the Christian Church admitted the Virgin Mary into its pantheon of gods to be worshipped (the others being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost – the Triune God, three in one) it achieved an astonishing marketing hit. Mary, mother of Jesus, was first officially designated worthy of worship by a decree of the Council of Ephesus in AD 431. Although officially the foremost of the Saints, she quickly became a female deity, figuring in representations of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and many other events in the life of Christ and especially in representations of herself and the Christ Child as an idealised Mother and Son. Religious orders, notably the Benedictines, took this up and her standing has persisted until today, with ‘Mariolatry’ conspicuous in the Roman Catholic church.
Her presence as an object of veneration has been of incalculable importance for painters and sculptors over the centuries. She became an ideal of womanhood, of motherhood, of female beauty, (sacred, of course, rather than profane, as epitomized in portrayals of the Greek goddess of Love, Aphrodite, or, in Latin, Venus). Mary’s mother was St Anne, and during the Italian Renaissance portrayals of her own birth became quite common.
The first great event of her life is the episode of the Annunciation, recounted in Luke’s Gospel (1, 26-38), when the Archangel Gabriel came to her while she was at her devotions, and announced that she would have a child who would be the Son, not of Man, but of God. Her shock, fear and exaltation are all emotions associated with this dramatic moment. A multitude of artists have given us their imaginative versions of the episode.
Simone is sometimes considered the greatest of the school of painters practising in fourteenth-century Siena, where the derivation of Italian religious painting from the stylized tradition of the Eastern, Orthodox Church can very clearly be traced. His gold-ground panel, in which he was assisted by his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi, was painted for the Cathedral in Siena. It is very large, and is now seen in a nineteenth-century reproduction gothic frame, flanked, as it perhaps wasn’t originally, by wings showing St Margaret of Antioch and St Ansanus, patron saint of Siena.
The archangel bursts into the space of the painting, robe still floating in the draught of his arrival, and carrying the olive branch that since Noah has been a symbol of God’s peaceful intentions towards Mankind. The angel speaks: the Latin words are there in relief against the gold: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.’ The cloud of cherubim above reiterate the message as a beam of light from the mouth of the dove, the Holy Spirit, which they cluster around.
Mary cowers away from this astonishing presence. She has been absorbed in her reading – her thumb still marks her place in the Scriptures – but she is obviously frightened, at a loss. She pulls her cloak round her as if to protect herself. We know that she will accept the Lord’s commission – her mouth is not yet open to say it, but ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ will be her submissive response: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’
An English sculptor working and teaching in Tuscany, Nigel Konstam, has with the help of three-dimensional models been able to demonstrate that Simone’s depiction of the Virgin’s gathered-up cloak is entirely accurate: the folds, hems and portions of revealed lining correspond precisely to how such a garment would behave when subjected to the Virgin’s shy gesture of withdrawal and self-protection. Grand and stylised as this picture seems, it is an attempt to represent a real event as truthfully as possible, offering a vivid and touching insight into the emotions of the young woman who was to become the Mother of God.