Pino Blasone The Hands of MaryStates of Mind in the Virgin Annunciate

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Montesiepi: Annunciation, sinopia Humiliatio Aber wunderbar sind dir/ die Hände benedeit./ So reifen sie bei keiner Frau,/ so

schimmernd aus dem Saum: “And yet your hands most wonderfully/ reveal his benison./ From woman’s sleeves none ever grew/ so ripe, so shimmeringly”; these are some words directed to Mary by the archangel Gabriel, in a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, issued in 1902 and titled Verkündigung: Die Worte des Engels (“Annunciation: Words of the Angel”).[1]

Of course, they are fruit of a literary imagination. There is no literal trace of them in the Scripture, peculiarly in Luke’s Gospel where the Annunciation is narrated. Nevertheless, the German poet could well be impressed by so many paintings, where the hands of the Virgin are depicted. Such a representation is not only a descriptive detail. Not seldom, it is the figurative rendering of a gesture language, referred to emotional moods or states of mind. Almost a mimic dance, whose sense transcends its explainable meaning itself.

As to those states of mind, they were analysed and codified already in the late Middle Ages, mostly as an interpretation and comment on Luke’s Gospel (1: 26-38). Pertinent examples are De laudibus Virginis matris by Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 12th century; the

Meditationes vitae Christi by Giovanni de Cauli or John of Caulibus (Pseudo-Bonaventura; 13th century); the Sermones de Annuciatione by Fra Roberto Caracciolo of Lecce (15th

century). De Cauli and Caracciolo explicitly allude to their visual representation. That was a time, when one language let the intellectuals communicate in large part of Europe. But art was a far more popular one, all the more in the great majority of illiterate people.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Montesiepi: Annunciation, detail In the latest Latin work, we can even find a list of stages crossed by Mary’s soul

during the event of the Annunciation: conturbatio (initial surprise and trouble), cogitatio (reflection, subsequent to the disconcerting announcement), interrogatio (inquiry, concerning the words of the angel), humiliatio (humble acceptance and faithful submission to God’s will), meritatio (intimate joy, thanks to the miraculous conception of Jesus). Indeed, especially St. Bernard regards the humiliatio as a free choice by the “full of grace”.

No doubt, those concepts had an ascendancy on the artists. Yet sometimes they visually anticipated, even exceeded their verbal formulation, in accordance with the true spirit of art. Let us consider the case of an Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Oratory of St. Galgano at Montesiepi, not far from Siena in central Italy. Dating back to the first half of the 14th century and very deteriorated, the fresco was detached during a restoration in 1966. Under that, a sinopia was discovered, quite different from the final picture. This preparatory drawing is a typical scene of conturbatio. The Virgin looks so perturbed by the apparition of the angel, that, instinctively, her arms clasp a near column.

Evidently, later the painter or his clients had a rethinking about. In the finished depiction, Mary’s hands are folded on her breast, to signify a full assent to her exceptional lot. What may be included into a typology of the so defined humiliatio, about a century before the classification by Caracciolo. More surprising is the resemblance between Montesiepi’s sinopia and a Virgin’s figure study, for a stained glass window in St. Martin’s-

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on-the-Hill Church (Scarborough, England, circa 1862; now in the Tate Collection at London). Sure, the author Edward C. Burne-Jones could not know that Lorenzetti’s precedent. Once again though, the resulting Annunciation is unlike its preparatory drawing.

E. C. Burne-Jones, London: study for an Annunciation, detail Conturbatio If we wish to detect some possible reason for the changing representation in the work

of Lorenzetti, we might rather read the Meditationes by John of Caulibus, which had a wide circulation then: Non fuit turbata turbatione culpabili, nec de visione Angeli. […] Turbata fuit in sermone eius, cogitans de novitate talis salutationis. […] Commendabatur enim quod esset gratia plena, et quod Dominus erat secum, et quod erat benedicta super omnes mulieres: at humilis non potest sui commendationem sine rubore et turbatione audire (“She was perturbed for no culpable motive, nor by the vision of the angel but by his words, since thoughtful about the novelty of his salutation. […] In fact, he had praised her thrice: as full of grace, telling that God was with her, and that she was blessed above all women. Indeed, no humble person might listen to be exalted likewise, without perturbation and blush”).[2]

Probably, Lorenzetti’s patrons or counsellors valued a humble image of the Madonna as a model more proper and edifying than a disquieting one. Such an iconography will be adopted in most further Annunciations, so that Mary’s arms or hands crossed on her breast will become almost a standard in this figurative genre. What does not mean the examples of conturbatio are few, in the history of art. In the Cestello Annunciation by Sandro Botticelli, Mary’s hands are hold out in a defensive attitude (Florence: Uffizi Gallery; ca. 1489).

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In an Annunciation by the Perugino, both palms of the hands are vertically raised and similarly positioned but not opposite the angel, what suggests a surprise prevailing on perturbation (Fano: Santa Maria Nova; 1498). In the Uffizi Gallery, we can also admire the Annunciation and Two Saints by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi (ca. 1330). Here one hand of the Virgin is lifted to close on her neck the dark veil, framing her fair face. It looks surprised and cautious at once. Like in so many paintings of this genre, the other hand rests on a Bible, she has been interrupted while reading. Often, the homage of a lily by the angel may look like an extensive invitation too, to interpret the holy text with a pure mind.

Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Florence:

Annunciation and Two Saints, detail More theatrical is the movement, such as figured in the Annunciations by the

Tintoretto (Venice: Scuola di San Rocco; 1582-87) or by Lorenzo Lotto (Recanati, Italy: Pinacotecha; ca. 1527). In the former Mary is clearly frightened, inside the disquieting interior of a decaying mansion, probable allegory of painter’s places and times. In the latter both hands are open, raised nearly to the level of her face, in a popular attitude of wonder. She avoids looking at the angel, kneeling on the floor behind her. Her eyes are lifted up, the gaze turned toward the heaven, as to beg protection from that uncanny presence. The disquiet roused into the everyday life is stressed by the nice trick of a home cat, springing aside as scared by that supernatural intrusion.

Another Lotto’s example of conturbatio is the Virgin Annunciate in the Church of Sts. Vincent and Alexander (Ponteranica, Italy; 1527). Anyhow, such an animation becomes more intense in the Baroque period, since congenial to its style. That is smartly evident in a

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Virgin Annunciate by a Florentine anonymous, today in the Dulwich Picture Gallery at London. One hand close to her heart, the palm of the other is raised up, turned toward the invisible angel. At the same time she stares downward, what for certain may be interpreted as reserved modesty, but also as a gaze sunk into the depth of an inmost dimension.

Yet the hardest expression of a conturbatio is not artistic, in a strict figurative sense. Rather, it is a literary one. In his modern poem The Mother of God, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats makes Mary herself narrate her experience. The initial allusion is to an odd tradition, which may be found in some apocryphal gospels, of a miraculous fecundation by the way of an ear of her. Here the perturbation grows as a sacred terror: “The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare/ Through the hollow of an ear;/ Wings beating about the room;/ The terror of all terrors that I bore/ The Heavens in my womb.// Had I not found content among the shows/ Every common woman knows,/ Chimney corner, garden walk,/ Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes/ And gather all the talk?// What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,/ This fallen star my milk sustains,/ This love that makes my heart’s blood stop/ Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones/ And bids my hair stand up?”.[3]

Sandro Botticelli, Florence: Cestello Annunciation, detail Interrogatio Just varying a bit the order, let us respect the sequence established by Fra Roberto

Caracciolo (and, long before him, by the Evangelist himself). After a first moment of bewilderment and before her acceptance of God’s demand, this is the time when Mary speaks to the angel. Obviously, she asks how it is possible the unnatural conception announced by him. Gabriel will answer what reliably she already knows: nothing is impossible to God’s will. The Virgin herself would be the best witness of such a possible impossibility. This is not a private miracle, since it is going to interfere with history itself.

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By an artist, it ought to be a problem translating the connotation of the interrogatio into a pictorial scene. For instance, one hand of an Annunciate by Francesco Vanni has its open palm turned upward so as her gaze, in a familiar inquiring gesture (Siena: Church of the Servites; 1588). The solution of Antonello of Messina, in his celebrated Virgin Annunciate at the National Museum of Palermo (ca. 1476), was to portray a previous instant. The lips of the Madonna are still closed. Yet one of her hands, stretched out toward a virtual interlocutor, anticipates the question she is going to pronounce.

Certainly, this painting is one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance. There is something enigmatic inside it, not less than in the famous Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci at Paris, in the Louvre Museum. We can better try to penetrate its mystery, by considering that here the imminent interrogatio is already a cogitatio, transparent in the expression of the entire figure (and, especially in our civilization, Mary’s image is the main figure of the soul itself). Nay, her reflection precedes the question and the answer. Likewise it might happen, sometimes, in an anticipatory awakening consciousness.

Anonymous, London: Virgin Annunciate, detail In itself, we dare to say, it is a not-yet-explicit inquiry. Generally, this does not

concern only a particular religious question, but is going to involve the whole sacred sphere. In this sense, the Palermo Virgin Annunciate seems to be a presage of the modernity, some years before the conventional start of the Modern Age. Furthermore, if we confront its dark background with the golden one of the Annunciation by Simone Martini, the effect of the former looks far more dramatic. Also this detail may be a signal of the changing times.

Just like in the painting by Martini, the other hand of the Madonna is raised up, to keep closed on her breast the blue veil covering her head, descending around her face and shoulders. Which dignified gesture here seems to denote the will to preserve a secret, deep inside her heart, even more than to be a bashful one. Such a feeling might even be a

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farseeing premonition of what Gabriel refrains from telling. That is, her incoming “joyful mystery” will convert into a sorrowful one, at least in a never enough far future.

Actually, we do not see the angel. We can only imagine him out of the frame and by our side, for a hand of the Virgin is outstretched toward and she is looking at the viewer of the picture – or, perhaps, further. Anyway, her attitude looks like a call for co-responsibility, we ourselves cannot escape. In this sense it may be interpreted a meditation by Meister Eckhart, a 13th century German mystic, of the Annunciation as an event thought to be replayed within us, as well as once in Mary’s life. What suits peculiarly the artists, hundreds of times being used to rethink the matter according to the culture of their time and place.

Francesco Vanni, Siena: Annunciation, detail

Cogitatio Let us go on reading the Words of the Angel to the Madonna, in the modern

reinvention by Rilke: Ich bin jetzt matt, mein Weg war weit,/ vergib mir, ich vergass,/ was Er, der gross in Goldeschmeid/ wie in der Sonne sass,/ dir kunden liess, du Sinnede/ (verwirrt hat mich der Raum)/ Sieh: Ich bin das Beginnende,/ du aber bist der Baum; “Pardon, now my long journey’s done,/ I had forgot to say/ what he who sat as in the sun,/ grand in his gold array,/ told me to tell you, pensive one/ (space has bewildered me)./ I am the start of what’s begun;/ you, Lady, are the Tree”. Now we better know, Mary is not only sensitive, pure and humble. She is also the “pensive one”, such as may be eminently listen to in the Magnificat, soon after the Annunciation in Luke’s Gospel. Indeed, her cogitatio sounds as a congenial quality, besides a state of grace and longer than a momentary mood.

John of Caulibus and Roberto Caracciolo were pious preachers, mainly an expression of the mentality of their times. Yet the original stature of a thinking Virgin stands out from the works of Meister Eckhart and – in a more orthodox way – of Bernard of Clairvaux.

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While according to Eckhart the acme of the Annunciation is the acceptance or resignation by Mary (in German, Gelassenheit), for Bernard her autonomous decision seems to be more important, not only as an existential choice but as a reflection of the human free will. Upon that moral decision it depends an individual salvation, as well as the redemption of history. After all, each one’s story is conditioned by and concurs to orient our common destiny. While Eckhart’s view is the deep insight of a mystic, Bernard’s one is the wider perspective of a thinker. His Christian goal is not a mere self-surrender, but an emerging Other too.

Antonello of Messina, Palermo: Virgin

Annunciate What ever could help Our Lady to take a so “crucial” decision? Though “blessed

among the women”, she is a woman as well. Besides the religious faith, a very human means seems to be the prayer, in her case for a further providential support or interior illumination. Plausibly that is why some artists – since Fra Angelico in the Perugia triptych to the Sassoferrato, or to Giovanni Bellini in the Polyptych of Saint Vincent Ferrer at Venice (ca. 1460) – depicted the Annunciate with joined hands, in a praying attitude.

Much later, one of the most impressive images of a thoughtful Madonna is in an Annunciation, inspired to the Afro-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner by a trip to the Holy Land (Philadelphia: Museum of Art; 1898). Inside a poor oriental chamber, she is sitting on her bed, looking perplexed and worried even more than alarmed or wary. The only light is shed by a dim angelic shape. Her clenched hands show the fingers intertwining in her lap. In this representation, surely the hope of the holy announcement and a denunciation

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of the same old world go hand in hand. As today as in the past, renunciation and denunciation are recurrent themes in the reflection about the Annunciation.

Giovanni Bellini; Venice, Chiesa dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo:

Polyptych of Saint Vincent Ferrer, upper right panel Meritatio Between macrocosm and microcosm, that is an outer and an inner vision, there is a

dialectic specularity. So deemed Renaissance thinkers, as Nicholas of Cues or Marsilio Ficino. A current novelty of the macrocosm was its rediscovered immensity. What about our microcosm? True icon of the soul, Heaven’s Door and copula mundi at once, Mary’s everlasting love works as an intermediary link. Before any real new thought, a strong emotion can be supposed as well. Like the ancient philosophy is told begot by wonder in front of the firmament, in one part we might consider the modern worldview influenced by the conturbatio, facing the mystery of Annunciation. That deals extensively with what is announced, implying a change in the perception of time. A time, now, in full progress, after the long incubation period of the Middle Ages absorbed in a messianic expectance.

Let us complete our transversal revisiting the evangelical narration. At last, the young maiden has chosen. Her decision has been taken. God’s messenger has gone. Yet she is no more alone. Her Self has conceived the Other, renouncing to and denouncing any selfishness. Within her, God has left himself as a live Logos. Also thanks to her and trough the incarnation, the eternal absolute Being has made himself contingent and relative, ready for an existential experience – and passion too – of his own creation.

“Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie/ In prison, in thy womb; and though He there/ Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,/ Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try./ Ere by the spheres time was created, thou/ Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother;/ Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now/ Thy Maker’s

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maker, and thy Father’s mother;/ Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,/ Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”: these verse are from the poem Annunciation, written by John Donne in the set of sonnets La Corona, in 1607.[4]

Bernardo Cavallino, Melbourne: Virgin

Annunciate Let us notice a complementary contrast of Donne’s “little room” with Rilke’s

expression “bewildering space”. In a renewed Platonic meaning, the Annunciation is a decisive step on the way of a transcendental reminiscence, as well as in view of a better secular future. Nevertheless was this promise, pact or chance, morally accomplished, on mankind’s side at least? Such a dramatic perception of the event – and, in background, of the human condition and nature – by the English poet, so affected by allegorical paradox and even by a sense of claustrophobia, sounds already advanced modern. It is analogous with its rendering by some contemporary painters, mainly influenced by the Caravaggio.

Among them, let us focus on the Neapolitan Bernardo Cavallino, on his Virgin Annunciate and The Blessed Virgin. In both pictures, the living model seems to be the same Mediterranean beauty. In the former (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria; 1650), indeed her expression looks nearly that of a Lady of Sorrows rather than of an Annunciate, in this respect not very dissimilar to those by Antonello and by Tanner. We can see her in profile and in the dark, in front of a hidden source of light, presumably coinciding with the announcing angel. Her hands are folded on the breast, in a traditional way. But there conturbatio, cogitatio and humiliatio, merge into one admirable synthesis.

By comparing it with The Blessed Virgin (Milan: The Art Gallery Brera; ca. 1650), we can better realize why here the background is almost fiery. Now the Madonna is turned frontward, in the full splendour of her majesty and glory. Similar to the white flowers which a baby angel is offering her, the hands are going to open, as to receive that immensity we

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read of in Donne’s verse. Hardly we might believe she is the same in both cases; moreover, the same model and character at once. Likely, along with the writing Madonna of the Magnificat by Botticelli in the Uffizi, that is the best scene of meritatio in the history of art. Akin to an ultrasound, there the mystery is carried to a point beyond which it is about to reveal itself. If we cannot hear or see it no more, reliably this is for our inadequate senses.

Bernardo Cavallino, Milan: Blessed Virgin, detail Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2008 [1] Rainer M. Rilke, Verkündigung (Die Worte des Engels), in the collection Das

Buch der Bilder, in Ausgewählte Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf Verlag, 1973; p. 9 (trans. James B. Leishman in Rilke: Poems, New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996).

[2] Johannes de Caulibus (Giovanni de Cauli, or de’ Cauli, or else da Calvoli), Meditationes vitae Christi, chapter IV (in S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, vol. XII, Paris 1868; pp. 514-16. Cf. Johannis de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi, olim S. Bonaventuro attribuitae, cura et studio M. Stallings-Taney, Turnhout, Belgique: Brepols, 1997; and John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, trans. Francis Taney, Anne Miller and Mary Stallings-Taney, Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2000). In the quoted passage, the author adds that Mary was used to the angelic vision or visitation. Indeed, such a justification is derived not from the canonical source, but from an apocryphal evangelical tradition.

[3] William B. Yeats, The Mother of God, in the collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems, firstly published in 1933.

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[4] Herbert J. C. Grierson (editor), The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912; p. 319. Cf. H. J. C. Grierson (ed.), Donne: Poetical Works, London: Oxford U. P., 1971.

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