Many modern New Testament scholars now view the conception and birthing stories as late additions to what became the canonical Gospel of Luke; further, there is a fair consensus among New Testament scholars that the Annunciation narrative was arguably not intended as history but was rather a theologoumenon, an extended parabolic narrative of the fulfilment of God’s purposes, reflecting the hopes and aspirations of its early audiences rather than historical events. Nevertheless, a distinctive mark of orthodox exegesis, continuing until the Enlightenment (and beyond) was that the Annunciation story did record an actual historical event, a miraculous intervention into human history.
Especially after the doctrinal pronunciations of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, the Annunciate Virgin became one of the most popular Madonnas of medieval devotion; representations of the Annunciation were among the most popular medieval devotional motifs, with the details of the scene providing an approved model of prayer: the Virgin kneeling at a prayer desk and Gabriel’s words, Ave gratia plena Dominus tecum, which were frequently spelt out within the visual representation. Among the common medieval devotions were the seven Joyful Mysteries of the Virgin, the Annunciation being the first. Mary was hailed as the ‘new Eve’, an invented tradition that countless medieval devotions, lyrics, plays, epics, as well as theological treatises, argued, sang, or intoned. ‘Eva’ becomes triumphantly reversed to ‘Ave’ in history’s ‘fortunate fall’, metaphorically impregnated per aurum, as her ears listened to Gabriel’s words, Mary reversed Eve’s listening to Satan’s.
Tina Beattie comments that, in evaluating the Marian tradition, ‘the cultural and devotional heritage—art and music, liturgy and popular piety—may give more comprehensive insight’ than ‘official doctrines and theological arguments’ (Beattie 2008: 4). Essential to reinforcing such doctrines in medieval popular culture were visual representations, including relics, painted walls, statues, images, in stone, wood, or stained glass, in churches and chapels, in a corner tabernacle, engravings, or books of hours. Yet despite its universality, a recurring anxiety frequently erupted that the Annunciation scene might be misread and ‘mis-seen’. Scopophiliac pleasures have been controversial throughout Christian history: frequent upsurges of iconophobia were built on suspicion of visual pleasure unless properly approved or supervised. Both Judaism and Islam maintained rigid, though never total, prohibitions on visual representations of the sacred; Christian attitudes were more ambivalent, sometimes bursting into iconoclasm but largely settling for supervision rather than suppression. In the Eastern Church, John of Damascus’s eighth-century treatise defending holy images justified the use of icons: while depictions of God were forbidden, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Divine Word becoming flesh, made visualizations of the Annunciation acceptable. In the West, Gregory the Great ruled that what writing does for the literate, a picture could do for the illiterate, thus reinforcing not only how the scene occurred, but an even more elemental level, that it actually occurred within human history and, by extension—especially through the deliberate anachronism of current fashion, terminology, or contemporary references—was alive in the present. Visual representations were further encouraged by the evocative invented tradition that Luke was not only a scribe (and a physician) but also a painter who represented the Virgin, from life, in both text and picture. Typical is Vasari’s version (1565), painted for the Florentine artists’ chapel, in which Mary leans over Luke’s canvas as if directing or correcting his representation.
Medieval artists were thus ‘professional visualiser[s] of the holy stories’ (Baxendall 1988: 44), urging the faithful to absorb the message of, and directly participate in, the miraculous story. Hundreds of representations of the Annunciation repeat motifs derived from the Lukan narrative; in addition, many incorporate allusions to the Crucifixion or Resurrection, thus providing an evocative image that compressed the whole narrative of salvation. Mary was typically depicted as humble and receptive, often reading a prophetic text; the angel could stand, sit, or kneel. There might be a dove representing the Holy Spirit and some representative of the deity, usually in an upper corner. There might be brief glimpses of a garden, as in Fra Angelico’s celebrated San Marco frescos, representing typologically both Eden and the hortus conclusus of Mary; windows were frequently depicted as penetrated by light without breaking, stressing the fenestrum crystallanum, Mary’s intact hymen miraculously penetrated by the Holy Ghost.
Viewers were thus ideologically positioned to recreate in their minds and emotions an approved reading of the scene’s meaning and exclude alternatives as heretical (and virtually unthinkable). But crucial to the cultural history of the Annunciation is how popular culture was not only guided to reinforce orthodox doctrine but, because both verbal description and visual representation might easily evoke in audiences desires that might not be entirely conscious or controllable, it could lead to inappropriately embroidered or even deviant interpretations. Paintings, poems, or plays might easily stray from orthodoxy, and it is, indeed, marginal texts that often voice a culture’s ‘not-saids’ or ‘barely-saids’, with a variety of potentially emergent stories percolating beneath the cultural surface. Inherent in the process of representation itself is the potential for opening multiple possibilities of interpretation: just as all stories are to some extent about story-telling, visual representations are partly about the making of art and inevitably contain an excess of potential signification. Such mysteries so central to the faith were closely policed by ‘strategies of containment’ (Ehrman 2006: 385), in effect an assumed code designed to guide faithful Christians’ understanding, derived from the Church authorities, and dutifully internalized by artists. Despite centuries of ecclesiastical vigilance, there was therefore inherent in the artistic ‘re-tellings’ of the Annunciation a potential latitude that opened up multiple possibilities of meaning.
At what historical point did such possibilities of variant interpretations start to surface? The early medieval iconographic tradition represented by, say, the Siennese artist Simone Martini’s rendering of the Annunciation now in the Uffizi (1328), powerfully freezes the scene into an image without any sense of a specific setting apart from its liturgical and devotional context. But gradually, spasmodically from the twelfth century on, representations make gestures towards evoking a particular location. Mary may be accompanied by symbols of domestic activities appropriate to her modesty and humility, like praying, sewing, or spinning, and so there may be a spindle, yarn, or prayer desk. By the fifteenth century, especially in Flanders, more attention was being given to setting and to accompanying domestic or communal minutiae such as pots, fires, chairs, or even details appropriate for Mary’s bedchamber. She is being moved closer to what viewers would recognize as their own world, a characteristic for which fifteenth-century Netherland painters like Van Eyck or Memling became renowned across Europe. These more naturalistic details were usually reassuringly accompanied by items with traditional associations (lilies, roses, backdrops of Adam and Eve, a closed gate, door, or curtain, all signifying Mary’s virginity; light entering the room, with or without the rays coming directly from a supernatural source), thus combining the emerging naturalism with the reassuringly traditional iconographic tradition.
There was also an increasing realism in the depiction of the Virgin herself. Rather than a humble (let alone poor and illiterate) girl from Roman-occupied Palestine, Mary was often dressed elaborately, as queen and empress, with jewels and rich fabrics, reflecting not the Gospel but the Protevangelium in which she is accorded royal or noble birth, but more specifically the recognizable contemporary world. By the fifteenth century, most artists dressed their Virgins in the high fashion of their own period. Along with such deliberately anachronistic fashion details there were frequently architectural or decorative settings expressing the domestic splendour of one destined to become Queen of Heaven, reflecting the status or aspirations of patrons, who sometimes might appear in the work, either in or out of the frame. These signs of alternative ways did not fully emerge until the late fifteenth century, when in a variety of arts and popular cultural forms like the ubiquitous community dramas, we can see the beginnings of a clearly identifiable degree of what eventually became a more radical demystification.
While paintings and other visual representations may have provided the most direct trigger of multiple responses to the Annunciation scene, verbal depictions and dramatized enactments were also potentially effective prompts for stimulating variations in interpreting the scene. Typically, poems on the Annunciation simply attempt to re-tell the story, taking details from both Luke and the Protevangelium tradition: Mary ‘full of grace’, pure and obedient, with the contrast with Eve and fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies frequently mentioned. Mary thus provides a model for her humility, submissiveness, and readiness to serve. Some poems imagine the speaker addressing Mary directly, as if in wonder or prayer; in others, she is praised or petitioned; some are lyrical, others more sombre as they anticipate the sorrowing mother of the Crucifixion, which is often held to be prefigured in the Annunciation itself. But many poems re-cast the Virgin as a courtly or other literary ideal, again opening the scene to multiple interpretations.
Likewise in the popular drama of the late Middle Ages: Annunciation plays, common across Europe, invited their audiences to see the enactment of the Annunciation mystery and, like Mary herself, to ponder it in their hearts. But the modes of presentation and possible responses were multiple. Some used elaborate stage effects for Gabriel’s descent to Mary, including pulleys, accompanying music, and in a number of cases, the use of flames. In Florence, Brunelleschi designed sets for Annunciation plays in the Basilica of the Annunziata that included elaborate flying machines. In one, ‘a fire comes down from God … rising up again in flames, with the fires subsiding when Gabriel returns to Heaven’; another was described by Isabella d’Este as having the sky opening up to show the descent of Gabriel between pillars in a cloud, as in so many Renaissance Annunciation paintings (Phillips-Court 2011: ch. 1).
Annunciation scenes in English medieval drama are particularly intriguing for the ways they open up variant readings. The ‘N-Town’ plays, an East Anglian collection probably made available for staging in individual scenes by local groups or travelling players, includes an interspersed composite ‘Mary Play’ which includes the apocryphal stories of Mary’s conception and upbringing by her parents, Joachim and Anna, her presentation in the temple, the Parliament of Heaven which meets to initiate Gabriel’s visit, the Annunciation scene itself, and the betrothal to Joseph and his doubts or ‘troubles’ about her. Using material from both Luke and Pseudo-Matthew, and elaborating the scenes for dramatic effect, the Mary Play stresses the Virgin’s special status, her self-denial, obedience, and her sexual purity, manifested, in the approved tradition, as a renunciation of the complexities of ordinary human sexuality (Waller 2011: 62–79). But it is in the dramatic elaborations that we see multiple interpretations emerging or implied. Many Annunciation plays were prefaced by scenes in Heaven in which God debates, as if in committee, with the other members of the Holy Trinity about man’s disobedience, and decides to dispatch Gabriel to inform Mary of her salvatory role. The York Annunciation play opens with a ‘Doctor’ (of Theology) expounding to the audience the truths of the Christian reading of history: mankind ‘bidand in blysse’ but ‘puute oute fro paradys’, until God decides to send his Son, ‘to take Kynde of mankyn / In a mayden full mylde’. In order to out-smart Satan, the chosen ‘mayden’ is to be married discretely, an echo of a common second-century explanation of why the virginal conception was kept secret and why, in the Christian (as opposed to the Islamic) version of the story, the role of a husband is important. The Doctor gives the typological background: Isaiah’s ‘virgin’ prophecy, the Lukan genealogy, and its culmination: ‘Thus of Cristis comyng may we see / How sainte Luke spekis in his gospel: / Fro God in heven sent, sais he, / An aungell is named Gabriell, / To Nazareth in Galale’. He concludes with a warning to the audience to ‘take hede, all that will here’. The play itself continues this orthodox interpretation of the Annunciation event, stressing Mary’s mildness and willingness to humble herself: ‘Be done to me of all manere / Thrugh thy worde als thou hast saide’ (Davidson 2011: 114). The scene itself is given only fifty lines; but 160 lines are given to the scene’s prologue to impress its true meaning upon the audience, but it also registers some anxiety that the truth of revelation might be distorted.
The Coventry Pageant of the Shearers and Taylors follows the same pattern, but instead has a prologue by the prophet Isaiah to reinforce the typological reading of the virginal conception. The Chester version similarly brings in an Expositor to stress what should be faithfully learnt; as in York, the Annunciation scene itself is likewise given relatively brief treatment. Joseph’s doubts are compressed into fifty lines. Interestingly, that scene occurs after Mary’s visit to Elizabeth; Elizabeth introduces Joseph, and remains present while he voices his doubts and is reassured by the angel. The Wakefield Annunciation Play stands slightly aside. It opens not with a ‘Doctour’ but God himself; predictably he provides the correct interpretation of the scene that follows, but the speeches contain an unusual level of human anxiety, a note that is almost certainly not deliberate but comes through as the writer tackles the challenge of putting divine discourse into human language. As a consequence, the play’s tone is not completely under control. The lines given to Gabriel may easily be read as flirtatious; nor is Mary entirely meek, demanding somewhat directly of Gabriel, ‘What is thi name?’ She then, more decorously, affirms her commitment to her unbroken ‘madynhede’; Gabriel, addressing her as ‘madame’, assures her that ‘thi madynhede shall never spyll, / Bot ay be new’ (Towneley Cycle 2010: 105). Such occasional tonal slippages suggest why the authorities were sometimes uneasy about representations of divine mysteries: as soon as character and motive, basic ingredients of a dramatization, are explored, the likelihood of misinterpretation enters.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, therefore, we can see a gradual but major cultural shift occurring in representations of the Annunciation—not just greater ‘realism’ but a particular shift in visual representation that intensifies the possibility of multiple readings. Such a development is intensified by the use of both single and multiple point perspective, which was to change not just the visual depiction of the Annunciation but all representation. Perspective was a technical and aesthetic breakthrough that, as much as the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, eventually helped change the way Europeans henceforth viewed the natural world. It provided an evocative way of extending the apparent depth of the scene, a more varied form of setting and, especially when multi-point perspective was used, could convey the mysterious boundary between infinity and temporality. Lorenzetti’s (1344) appears to have been the first Annunciation to place the scene in a consciously rigorous geometric space, but the traditional iconographic style is maintained with ribbons of dialogue issuing from Gabriel’s and Mary’s mouths: Gabriel’s reassurance of Non est impossibile apud Deum omne verbum and Mary’s dutiful Ecce Ancilla Domini. By the 1470s, when Leonardo and Botticelli are producing their Annunciations, their figures move comfortably in the new unified space. Perspective thus became the accomplice of the authority of the Church. But perspective had unanticipated revolutionary impact as the apparent realism of the scene posed problems for the traditional reading of the scene.
As well, once again from the fifteenth century, annunciate Virgins become more physically attractive. The annunciate Virgins of the late fifteenth century are increasingly closer to real women and conversant, leading to speculation regarding the ‘miraculous’ nature of impregnation and, by extension, the whole scene. In many paintings a viewer’s response is potentially eroticized by changing the venue of the scene to a bedroom; some deliberately use a ‘uterine perspective’, whereby the viewer’s gaze is directed by the lines of perspective converging at or disappearing into the Virgin’s womb (Moffit 2008: 170–81). The Virgins are thus sexualized, a charge levelled repeatedly by Lollards and eventually in Protestant attacks on what was seen as the sexualization of the medieval Church (Waller 2011: ch. 2).
An extremely sensitive aspect of the Annunciation story from the earliest times was the mechanism by which the Virgin was impregnated. Exegetically, it was handled by a selective reading of the Lukan metaphor of ‘overshadowing’. Visual representations of the scene avoid physical, let alone sexual, suggestiveness about what is happening in the Virgin’s body. Some stressed that conception occurred by sight, with Gabriel directing his eyes into Mary’s, but the most popular symbol chosen to represent the moment of impregnation became the flying dove representing the Holy Spirit speeding towards Mary as she is approached by Gabriel. In the iconographic tradition carnality could be excluded or at least allegorized, but the more realistic the depiction of the Virgin, the more likely it was that sexualized responses could develop.
Even before the explicit onslaught of the Reformation’s attacks on the alleged sexualization of images of the Virgin and the parallel decree by the Council of Trent to simplify representations of religious personages, we see a rising uneasiness among ecclesiastical authorities concerning religious images. Iconophobia was never far from the surface, especially as the various cults of the Virgin reached remarkable, even ecstatic heights during the fifteenth century, both in ordinary devotions and in contemporary mystical developments. The rosary, which was to excite such intense Protestant dislike following the Reformation, was championed by the papacy and church authorities in the late fifteenth century. As the mood for reform of the Church gathered pace, the propriety of imagery once again came into sharp focus. The most blatant expression of unease about representation was the coup staged in late fifteenth-century Florence by Savonarola, which culminated in the famous ‘bonfire of vanities’. The radical preacher accused painters of dressing the Virgin inappropriately instead of as a humble girl: asking whether they believed the Virgin Mary dressed like a whore. In the wrong hands and in a changing visual and philosophical environment ‘the sacred could so easily become the sacrilegious’ (Ferrie 2011: 6).
What we therefore see in representation, broadly conceived—in illustration, poem, or play—as the early modern world approached (as we know in hindsight) was therefore the emergence not just of alternative readings of the scene, but a new way of characterizing its representations, whether in the wide-ranging empiricism of Netherlands painters or the more strictly geometric perspectivism of Italy. The traditional reading of the Annunciation scene is nowhere questioned on explicit theological or historical grounds; the power of the traditional reading is backed by the authority of the Church and its hold over the human imagination and fantasy production are still too strong for alternatives to emerge except indirectly. The iconographic tradition had therefore been safer in that the approved emotions like humility, passivity, and obedience could be encoded without disruption. The more realistic the depiction became, the greater would be the temptation to judge the Virgin in terms of the behaviour of ‘real’ women.
Then came the Reformation. In considering the cultural history of the Annunciation story in the period of upheaval between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the overwhelming continuity of the traditional beliefs must be stressed. As Protestants pared away medieval Marian festivals and devotions, the Annunciation was left untouched—except the occasional relabelling of the feast day as the Annunciation of Christ, not to Mary—and reformers did not challenge the traditional historical interpretation. Yet, if we jump forward three hundred years, writing in the 1830s in his Life of Jesus, David Strauss could look back on two centuries of scholarship, and remark on the implausibility of the ‘supernaturalistic’ explanation of the story (1860: 558, 578). Since Strauss’s time—with earlier anticipations from the seventeenth century—the historicity of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary has been increasingly called into question by modern New Testament scholars. Here I try to trace the start of that major cultural transition.
Regardless of their underlying agreement about the story’s historicity, Protestants and Catholics did argue over the Annunciation’s angelic greeting and Mary’s merits. The words of the angel in Jerome’s version had sunk deeply into the cultural unconscious of the West, reinforced, as I have suggested, by countless visual expressions. For Catholics, Gabriel’s salutation implied that Mary herself was full of grace; Protestants argued, however, that she was given favour from God in her obedience, thus avoiding any sense she was worthy through her own merit. The key transitional figure was Erasmus whose translation of Gabriel’s greeting to Mary was distinctively different from Jerome’s. Rejecting the phrase that had for centuries been institutionalized in the Ave Maria, Erasmus’ Mary was gratiosa, not gratia plena, ‘gracious’ rather than ‘full of grace’. Erasmus’s versions of the key verses linking the Annunciation and Magnificat, 1:38 and 1:48, have a similar emphasis on Mary’s humility and God’s overwhelming power. Erasmus interprets the Greek tapeinosin as humilitatem, ‘lowliness’ rather than just ‘humility’, and again stresses divine favour not the Virgin’s inherent grace. Luther translated the angelic greeting not by voll Gnade (full of grace) but as holdselige (lovely and gracious). In the Annunciation, Mary herself ‘ascribes all to God’s grace, not to her merit’. For though she was without sin, yet that grace was far too great for her to deserve it. In his commentary on the Magnificat (1522) Luther stresses that while God employs the humble and obedient Mary as the voice of prophecy, nevertheless He works through Christ without any human merit or cooperation. Luther depicts Mary as an ordinary humble woman, whose parents were ‘poor, despised, and lowly’, and certainly not a goddess, let alone Queen of Heaven: ‘She gives nothing: God gives all’. Mary regards herself as ‘uniquely unworthy’; she ‘draws all of the attention toward God’. It is ‘not she who is praised, but God’s grace to her is praised’. She was given favour only from God in her obedience (Rundell et al. 2015: 21–79). Calvinists tended to play down Mary’s role further; for Calvin, God reveals to Mary that she is elect, but she is a secondary figure, strictly subordinate to her son who alone is ‘full of grace’. In exile from Queen Mary’s Catholic England, the Geneva Bible likewise thundered that the ‘grace’ or ‘favour’ accorded to the Annunciate Virgin was emphatically not for her merits, but only through God’s free mercy.
For the Catholic Church, wrestling with the challenges of the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545–63) reiterated the centuries-old dogmas: Mary was holy and free from sin by God’s special creation; by calling her kecharitomene, gratia plena, full of grace, Gabriel acknowledged her as endowed with eternal perfection and endowed to intercede mankind. Trent also tackled one of the most insistent Protestant criticisms concerning the place of sacred images in Christian devotion; images were, the Council reassured the Catholic faithful, a primary means by which empathy and piety could be developed, but they needed to be unambiguous and doctrinally orthodox. Trent also upheld the importance of unwritten traditions, thus sanctioning the stories in the Protevangelium and its derivatives (Waller 2015: 113–15).
One result of Trent’s firm re-affirmations of traditional dogma and the appropriateness of images was an extraordinary flourishing of Marian devotion. The Annunciation plays a crucial though significantly changing role in that aggressive manifestation of Catholic revival. The writings of Pierre Berulle, Jean Eudes, and other French ‘mystics’ of the seventeenth century are characterized by a recurring, even obsessive, emphasis on the Virgin’s self-abasement; yet it is combined with celebration that, through Mary, the female principle is firmly, even gloriously, placed at the centre of salvation: ‘She is closer and more united with’ Jesus ‘while he is in her and is part of her’. ‘Being in her is like being in heaven’, Berulle exclaims; considering Mary’s pregnant body, we realize ‘there are wonders that are in the Virgin’ which are even ‘not in heaven’. Mary is ‘the grandest object … and the rarest effect’ of God’s power; she possesses a grace that is ‘quite unique and belongs to her alone’. Mary’s role as Mother of God ‘signifies the presence of divinity within the very fibres of the material creation’, proclaims Berulle. She knows God’s secrets ‘since they take place in her’, and she accomplishes with God ‘in the Incarnation what he accomplishes alone in eternity’ (Thompson and Glendon 1989: 49, 159, 161, 164, 168, 271). St John Eudes’s commentaries similarly combine Mary’s humility and exaltation. She exemplifies perfect feminine reticence in not revealing the ‘tremendous mystery which exalted her to the highest pinnacle’, but her humility is combined with triumphant affirmations of her power and inherent grace: ‘She considered herself as being the last’ [of all creatures] ‘even though she was in fact the first’. She is hailed as ‘Queen of all the angels and saints, even the damned and demons praise her’, and he affirms that Gabriel ‘does not say she will be but that she is full of grace’. She is therefore to be accorded ‘absolute and sovereign power in heaven, on earth and in hell’ and we can ‘almost say’ that she herself ‘has given greater things’ to God even ‘than she has received’ (Eudes 1921: 9, 44, 56, 62; 1948: 21, 72, 217, 233).
The tone of such accolades suggests how, in post-Tridentine Catholic devotion, the Annunciate Mary becomes revered primarily not just as the obedient and humble virgin so characteristic of medieval art and devotion; instead she is increasingly described and depicted in the light of more transcendent and powerful metaphors—as the Immaculate Virgin begotten before time, the triumphant Virgin of the Assumption, the victor of battles, scourge of heretics, Queen or Empress of Heaven, figurehead of the Church Triumphant, the Queen of Angels, and empress of the world and even of Hell. This militant and transcendent Mary is not a new creation, but the emphasis in theology, devotion, and representation makes a distinctive shift, in great part because of the threats of the Protestant Reformation, the fear of Muslim invasion, and eventually the rationalist suspicion of the miraculous voiced by Enlightenment scholars.
We can trace such a shift in a variety of popular cultural forms. A favourite Catholic literary genre was a semi-fictional life of the Virgin. Typically, her humility at the Annunciation is noted but not dominant; rather, the overwhelming focus is on her power and authority as ‘Empress of the Universe’. Descriptions of the Annunciation scene itself generally have the slightly cloying tone of a genteel courtly romance. For instance, in Lucrezia Marinella’s quasi-biography (1602, in Haskins 2008), when Gabriel approaches Mary, he is described as ‘a most elegant and upright young man’, approaching a young virgin descended from a rich family of ‘illustrious and royal blood’, who is ‘accustomed to seeing Angels on other occasions’. We are given a blazon of her childish charms—her bright tiara-like hair, her lips shining like cherubim wings, her cheeks trembling with ‘the tenderness of milk and blood’, and the ‘whole of her glorious body’ as a ‘composition of ivory’. In an especially prurient detail, her father Joachim ‘seemed to become younger’ as he lays out her clothing that ‘maternal prudence’ then wrapped around the child before offering her ‘milk’s sweetness, which gushed from the sources of her breast’. Mary’s extreme youth is emphasized (reaching the age of thirteen, she is required to marry, we are told), but since ‘young girls, who gave birth before they were married, had to be stoned’, like the heroine of a romance, she is threatened with violent death and must be belatedly rescued by the Angel’s message. Marinella’s Annunciation scene shares in the overall melodramatic and even voyeuristic elaboration. Gabriel speaks of how she has ‘inflamed the heart’ of God, to which, in modesty, she ‘blushed deeply pink’, opened her ‘beautiful lips’, so that God’s spirit ‘penetrated lightly through all the inner parts and bones of the happy young girl’. Marinella’s poems on the Annunciation likewise depict Mary blushing like ‘rosy dawn as she comes laughing down’, ‘strewing nectar and flowers from her breast and her hair’. Another Italian woman poet, Francesca Turina, writes a sonnet on the Annunciation as not only initiating human redemption but the restoration of women’s role to the ‘pristine dignity intended it for God’ (Cox 2011: 67, 70). Such rhetorical idealizing flourishes are typical of Counter-Reformation popular Mariology (Haskins 2008: 73, 123, 146–62, 164–7, 239).
The exuberant theatricality characteristic of early modern Catholicism’s militant Marianism is also reflected in the popularity of another literary form, the biblical epic. Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis (1521–26) focuses on paraphrasing the Lukan narrative but includes multiple classical parallels. Mary emerges again as a romance heroine, a frightened young girl abandoned on the shore; Gabriel is a descending godlike figure who calms the raging seas: ‘pale and alone she stood, like a little maid who, gathering sea-shells on the sands of some small Aegean isle’ sees a ship sailing towards the shore and who, paralysed with terror, must ‘seek safety in flight’ (Greene 1963: 151–5; Nash 1996: 13).
These epics are dramatic stories of heroic figures engaged in larger than life mythological episodes, characterized by parallels with classical epics, and depicting the world as a battleground between the forces of good and evil, the latter frequently identified with Protestant heresy—just as in equivalent Protestant epics the enemy is identified with papist idolatry. In English, the most celebrated Protestant example of the genre, belated and culturally anachronistic, is Milton’s Paradise Lost. Earlier, in his poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, Milton gives us a typical Protestant de-centring of the Virgin at the Annunciation. There is no sense that the Virgin is the high point of creation, as the Catholic epics celebrate her. More aggressively, in Paradise Lost, Milton turns what he would see as idolatrous medieval hymns to the Virgin into types of the Fall, placing Catholic titles for the Virgin from the hymns Regina Coeli and Ave Maris Stella into Satan’s praise of Eve (Gardiner 1994: 156–61).
I turn now to the visual arts, perhaps today the most widely known (and variously admired or deplored) expressions of Counter-Reformation Marian devotion. It is there that we see most spectacularly the impact of the new enthusiasm and aggressiveness of early modern Catholicism, and most importantly in the present context, and probably without such an intention, the decentring of the Annunciation story in favour of the more dramatic and supernaturally oriented events of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption.
The Baroque—both an epoch and a complex of stylistic tendencies and a term which we can apply to both Catholic and Protestant culture—is an era when the new empirical history battles with multiple modes of fictionalizing as competing forms of knowledge and both get caught up in the overwhelmingly popular Baroque technique of hyperbole. Just as Baroque art is characterized by a combination of clear detail and exaggerated motion that we see in drama, sculpture, opera, and architecture, Baroque narrative revels in the contradictory, the coincidental, the preposterous. Reversals, discoveries, miracles are commonplace and were widely popularized by printing, engraving, and other forms of mass production and distribution (Maravall 1986: 81–8). The omnivalent hyperbolic conceits of Baroque religious art are ways of proving the contradictory and the impossible, designed to evoke amazement and wonder in an age in which residual cosmic correspondences are still adhered to but which are felt to be under threat. The Jesuits in particular grasped that images also needed to be easily reproduced, thus contributing to what the premier theorist of the Baroque, Jose Maravall, points to as a crucial characteristic of post-Tridentine Catholicism, its reliance on the serial production of kitsch, thousands of cheaply produced devotional aids, both verbal and pictorial on ‘an unprecedented quasi-industrial scale’ (Braider 2015: 42). The combination of multiplicity and hyperbole becomes a form of ideological intervention and a means by which as many as possible of the faithful (or, especially in the New World, the potential converts) could be encouraged to close the gap between concrete reality and desire, real and ideal (Maravall 1986; Waller 2017).
Two Annunciations painted by Titian are indicative of the transformation of the scene in Catholic art. An early Titian in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1530) has the traditional Renaissance landscape and loggia background, its floor of black and white squares drawing the viewer’s gaze across the horizon to the inscrutable, silent figure of the Virgin, whose impenetrable mystery is emphasized by formal folding of hands over her upper body. By contrast, in a later rendition (1559–64, San Salvador, Venice), the Annunciation meeting of angel and Virgin is surrounded by violent invasive revelations from above that replace the serene horizontal balanced representations of the classical style. It involves a radically new presentation of sacred space, with a low horizon and the upper part of the painting filled with angels, within a dramatic spectacle of dark clouds, and flaming lights more familiar in representations of the Passion or, staying within Marian iconology, the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, a doctrine highlighted in the Catholic Counter-Reformation in defiance of Protestant rejection of the belief. The accompanying dove descends, surrounded by bursts of white, its violent trajectory becoming the focal point of the painting. The Virgin is agitated, as if caught unexpectedly, her posture reminiscent of the rape by Tarquin of Lucretia in Titian’s painting of that scene. The figures in both paintings are observed, at a steep angle from below, so they look far above the ground, as if entering from another dimension, as if the earthly world in the painting and by extension the spectator is being overwhelmed by the diagonal sweep of Gabriel and his heavenly accompaniments (Waller 2015: 123–7). The painting stresses the dramatic, even apocalyptic, nature of the scene, in a style more characteristic of the Virgin’s Assumption or her glories as Queen of Heaven.
El Greco’s Annunciation paintings, produced slightly later than Titian’s, are similarly characterized by a distinctively Baroque visionary space, in which the protagonists are buffeted by supernatural cloud masses, hosts of angels, spiralling bursts of colour. No longer is the illusory space of the painting an extension of the viewer’s physical reality; the space evokes rather a transcendent world impacting violently upon the settled world of the viewer. In an Annunciation painting for a seminary dedicated to the Incarnation, El Greco incorporated the traditional iconography of the angelic salutation and Mary reading—but combined it with a burst of angels and clouds, and swirling vivid colours to convey the ecstatic moment of conception. Once again, wonder, the attempt to reach an extra-rational level of response that would move the will to submission to the prevailing powers, whether the Church or the absolutist state (Waller 2015: 128). Among Protestant artists, by contrast, painting and sculpting in the shadow of spasms of iconophobia and more wary of what could interpreted as sliding into idolatry, most religious subjects are more restrained, and were less encouraged by both civil and religious authorities.
Reformation controversies, then, opened up a variety of interpretations of the Annunciation scene, though still within the traditional paradigm of its being a miraculous historical event. Beneath the theological agreements and differences, however, over the next two hundred and more years a further major cultural shift occurred, and what for a millennium and a half had been seen as the historical account and celebration of the central event of God’s intervention into human history, became caught up into that transition. Again, we can see what would be virtually unsayable starting to emerge and not just among elite philosophers but in the arts and other material practices. In both Catholic and Protestant Europe, early modern culture started to integrate traditional sacral elements into specifically human relationships and activities, undergoing a process that gradually detached them from transcendental origins. Patterns of the Annunciation appeared in secular works of art, as in effect, ‘quotations of sacred art in a secular tenor’ as if what had once been unimpeachable signifiers of divine revelation now had to be found within the human. In one of the most telling inversions of icons and objects in European religious art, for instance, the Dutch abolished images of the Madonna from their churches, only to revive them in domestic scenes (Watson 2006: 167). Signs of such gradual dis-enchantment are particularly intriguing in the Protestant Netherlands in the paintings of Vermeer. We can read his young women beside windows with light streaming in on them as secularized references to the Annunciation. The sacred story, Kristeva’s ‘before the word’ experience, still provides the background, and the traditional motifs are still there: flowers of the enclosed garden, the table covers recalling the canopies that traditionally might separate Mary and Gabriel, a string of pearls a secular reminder of a rosary. The Annunciation pattern is seen most explicitly in Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). There is no angel, no sense of the supernatural, but the arrival of the letter has captured its recipient and the painting’s viewers between two worlds. Above the woman, a secular Mary, there is an ominously swirling blank wall, darkening from light gold to brooding cloudiness as it rises to the ceiling—hiding, x-rays have revealed, a figure of Cupid that Vermeer painted out as if it would have made the eroticization of the scene too obvious—its threatening emptiness bare of the heavenly crowd of angels that a Counter-Reformation artist sucuh as Titian or El Greco would have presented as an affirmation of divine power. Its emptiness seems to suggest abandonment by heaven; as it rises behind the reader, an unsaid void, it seems subject only to the winds that swirl contradictorily from each side. And what the young woman sees in the windowpane is not an angel but the reflection of herself. She is engaged in contemplating the new self of the emerging secular world caught uneasily between enchantment and disenchantment. Vermeer has captured a singular moment of a culture in transition (Waller 2015: 158–60).
We get another glimpse of what is starting to occur in the ideological shifts of the period from the ways in which Shakespeare treats the Annunciation. In England, Annunciation plays, along with the rest of the community-based medieval cycle plays, disappeared under the pressure of Protestant protests against ‘blasphemous’ or ‘idolatrous’ representations of holy matters. Yet in a number of Shakespeare’s plays the Annunciation is evoked as a pattern of experience dissociated from its doctrinal or historical origins as if it has become a powerful part of Western mythology but no longer an obligatory focus of doctrine, devotion, and belief. In Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius ‘loose’ Ophelia to Hamlet; she takes up the familiar posture of an isolated woman reading a book subject to a visit from a male figure. Ophelia’s ‘orisons’—her posing in Annunciatory posture as a pious devotee with a prayer book—and Hamlet’s quip about her getting to a nunnery, associate her with the lost Catholic world. Ophelia is addressed ironically as ‘gracious, so please you’; in the second Quarto, the reference is made more explicit by Polonius’ remarking ‘that show of such an exercise may colour / Your loneliness [or lowliness]’.
It is a pattern repeated elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays. In Twelfth Night, Viola’s first encounter with Olivia, posing as Cesario, also recreates an image of the Annunciation: Viola holds an olive branch and tells an apprehensive Olivia ‘his’ message concerns her ear only, and at Viola’s second visit, Olivia commands that the garden gate be closed, thus creating a hortus conclusus. ‘My matter hath no voice, lady’, says ‘Cesario’, ‘but to your own most pregnant and vouchsaf’st ear’ (III. i. 90–91). In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s dedication to virginity and the ascetic convent life is interrupted by Lucio’s salutation—his name perhaps echoing ‘Luke’—adapting Gabriel’s words to Mary: ‘Hail virgin, if you be’ (I. iv. 16). Lupton points out that ‘Lucio’s annunciation is brought to fruition when a virgin named Mariana, who lives at ‘St Luke’s’ (II. i. 265) becomes with the help of an Angel[o] a woman neither maid, wife, nor widow’ (1996: 113). In such scenes Shakespeare relies on the collective memory of his audience for recognizing the origin of his religious parodies. Such broad-ranging cultural immanentalizations of the Annunciation story show that alongside orthodox interpretations (and certainly not, to the faithful, replacing them) the Annunciation story emerges as one of the primal metaphorical patterns of human experience, less an historical ‘event’ and more a story with profound psycho-cultural roots.
The Annunciation story in Luke’s Gospel leads directly into the story of Mary’s visit to her pregnant cousin Elizabeth and Mary’s canticle of the Magnificat, and in the seventeenth century new emphases in references to the Magnificat that show both the distinctions between Protestant and Catholic readings of the Annunciation scene and, in certain Protestant communities, a striking emphasis on women’s experience. We should not overlook the fact that, whether in the voice of Elizabeth (as some early manuscripts have it) or Mary, the Magnificat is spoken or sung by a woman. It is, after all, a woman, Beattie argues, who in the Annunciation scene is ‘the first to know’, and next in the Magnificat ‘the first to articulate, the fullness of God’s reconciling love’. ‘In the Magnificat’, she continues, ‘we hear Eve describing the world which she was created to share with Adam, to which she has been restored in Mary’ in the Annunciation. The canticle therefore, at least potentially, is a sign of what Beattie terms ‘deep resistance’ to the historical reluctance within Christendom to speak ‘of God in anything other than the language of fatherhood and masculinity’. Luke gives us ‘a narrative for and about women, in which women speak for themselves and proclaim their own salvation’ and through which ‘androcentric and patriarchal structures’ that overwhelmingly dominated Christian history can conceivably be circumvented (Beattie 1999: 126; 2002a: 71–2; 2002b: 168; 2003: 157).
To what extent are such revelations explicit (or even pre-emergent, percolating beneath the cultural surface and only observable from a later period)? Even though the triumphal note of the Magnificat may give us a glimpse of a challenge to residual gender hierarchies that was likely present in some early Christian communities, nonetheless the prominence of women in the Early Church seems to have quickly diminished. While some of the apocryphal Gospels (notably the Gospel of Mary [Magdalen]) had elevated the leadership of women, others included episodes clearly written to keep them subordinate. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons the Magnificat was attributed (or re-assigned) to the Virgin, not to Elizabeth, as in some early manuscripts, was to stress Mary’s exceptionalism and to discourage prophetic or even a speaking role for ‘ordinary’ women.
Some hints of an early modern revaluation of the place of women in Christian communities can be seen in the way the Annunciation and Magnificat surface, however marginally, in seventeenth-century Protestant prophetic discourse. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, there had developed a strong tradition of women’s prophetic mystic and creative voices, often struggling against ecclesiastical authorities to express their ‘own’ voices. Yet where echoes of the Magnificat are found in their writings, they tend to stress the humility of the Virgin as handmaid rather than the triumph of a woman speaking forth. Following the Reformation, Protestant commentary on the Magnificat also highlights Mary’s exemplary lowliness and humility. However, at least in some revolutionary circles in the English Civil War, a few women did turn to Mary’s prophetic role in the Magnificat as a model of empowerment. Kristeva argues that one ‘great exploit’ of women in the Baroque era—which she sees in the Catholic Teresa of Avila but which can also be seen among radical Protestant women—was for the ‘owned’ female voice to move from humbly ‘feel[ing] rapture’ to where she could rather ‘tell it; to write it’, to place ‘the turbulence of desire in full view and in common’ (Kristeva 2014a: 20, 35, 47). A number of Protestant women affirm their write to speak out through their ‘strength in weakness’, or, in the words of the Puritan prophet Sara Wight, despite being ‘an empty nothing creature’ like the Annunciate Virgin (Crawford 1993: 97). The Puritan seer Eleanor Davies looks towards the coming of a new age when the Lord will ‘put his word in [women’s] Mouth. He powreth his spirit upon his handmaidens’ and ‘the rich’ will be ‘sent emptie away’ (Cope 1995: 2). In such examples, the strong and articulate Mary of the Magnificat is complementing (some might say challenging) the more humble figure of the Annunciate Virgin.
Such sentiments remain marginal, but notwithstanding the overall cross-confessional consensus on the origins, historicity and many of the meanings of the Annunciation story, there were distinctive emergent emphases among (and within) both Catholic and Reformed readings that were helping to open fissures in that consensus, and to lay the basis for what Weber was famously, even if exaggeratingly, to term the dis-enchantment (Entzauberung) of the medieval universe and its theological underpinnings (1946: 155). Beneath both the differing Catholic and Protestant emphases on the Annunciation story, a number of European philosophers and theologians were increasingly calling the historicity of Luke’s stories into question. Spinoza casts doubt on the Gospels’ historical veracity; John Toland argues in Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) that doctrines contrary to reason are often the products of generations of superstition, and included in his list is the whole Lukan sequence of the virginal conception and birth, including both Annunciation and Magnificat; John Woolston likewise asserts that the accounts in Luke ‘imply Improbabilities and Incredulities’. Enlightenment Christianity—at least in Protestant Europe—saw itself as developing rationally defensible beliefs without what became seen as folkloric accretions (Toland 1696: 152; Woolston 1727: 4).
Despite the emergence of these sceptical interpretations of the Annunciation, what is remarkable is the longevity of the traditional modes of reading the story. So I move now to speculate by what psychological and cultural mechanisms did the scene lodge itself so deeply into cultural history? Why has the Annunciation scene remained such a powerful magnet not just to believers but to artists, writers, and, today, many outside traditional Christian beliefs? Believing Christians’ explanation, by contrast, may simply be that the power of divine revelation decreed it should be so. The Annunciation story would therefore continue to be read as the affirmation of incarnational theology, God taking flesh in Mary’s body with her perpetual virginity, whether as fact or metaphor a central belief, reaffirmed in catechism and doctrinal pronouncements. The scene can also be read not as stressing passivity, duty, or humility but rather affirming what Sarah Coakley (2002: 39) terms ‘power-in-vulnerability’. Mary, argues Beattie, is a woman who is the first to know the fullness of God’s reconciling love in her whole body (Beattie 2002b: 71).
But for the cultural historian, it is too easy simply to say it was because of revelation, or the authority of the Church. We must pay attention to such arguments, to the power and continuity of dominant discourses, but societies do not always leave explicit signs of strain and transition on the surface, and we may need alternate ways of reading to locate where cultural change is occurring or threatening to occur.
Kristeva exalts the Annunciation as a ‘before the beginning’ or ‘before-the-word’ narrative deeply rooted in humanity’s ‘need to believe’ and describes it as emerging from Christianity’s alluring mixture of ‘perversity and beauty’, winning the ‘adherence of the masses’ by supplying powerful images ‘for even the fissures in our secret and fundamental logic’ (Kristeva 1982: 125; 1987: 41–2). Religion, in Kristeva’s view, may be ‘nothing less than illusion’, but it is ‘a glorious one’, an ‘unrealistic construct’ which through its stories can nevertheless give us accurate representations of the ‘reality of its subjects’ dreams’ as we ‘destabilized’ human subjects search for stabilization (Kristeva 1987: 19). The Annunciation scene can then be seen, even from outside the Christian tradition, as a heartening story of a moment of eternity breaking into time, which is then celebrated in the Magnificat. The Annunciation is also an affirmation of motherhood, an experience (and a complex mythology) so deeply rooted that it seems to embody a direct experience of the divine, what Jungians would term an ‘archetype’ of human experience. Kristeva speaks of how ‘feminine fertility and pregnancy continue to fascinate our collective imagination’ because they ‘serve as a sanctuary’ for ‘what has survived of religious feeling’. Psychologically, it is a deep-seated remembering of the infant’s primal closeness to the mother, with the Virgin who, unlike mortal women (and especially in multiple patriarchal fantasies) provides a return to the timeless, never-ending security of a primal figure. We might ask to what extent is the idealization of Mary as virgin mother an expression of a deep-seated remembering of the infant’s seemingly unique, exclusive primal closeness to the mother within the Mother? But many modern feminists argue the image of a ‘domesticated’ obedient Virgin is not an adequate model for women at all, and indeed embodies a male desire to re-create lost, even pre-conscious memories, his foetal dwelling place, his first home, with the ‘Mary’ so constructed given a profile and a history that seems to embody and fulfil such fantasies. Probing into unconscious patterns of desire, Kristeva asks: why ‘a virgin mother?’ Citing gendered fantasy structures, she observes that ‘we want our mothers to be virgins so we can love them … without fear of a rival’; and, she notes, from clinical experience as well as theory, ‘more than one mother has been sustained … by the fantasy of having a child without the aid of a father’ (Kristeva 1987: 42).
But, however uplifting and affirmative and however deeply rooted in such primitive layers of the unconscious such explanations for the longevity of the scene’s power may be, for many feminists today the Annunciation story has become especially suspect for its assumptions regarding gender. While early commentators like Origen or Irenaeus praised Mary for obedience, especially in the key verse 38 where she refers to herself as doule, variously translated as a female servant, handmaiden, or ‘the lord’s slave’, welcoming God’s overcoming of her in a self-sacrifice of her desires—barely acknowledged in the scene and swept aside by Gabriel’s admonition—to divine will, Elizabeth Johnson remarks that such an image too often leads to ‘that ideal of woman as an obedient handmaid, passively receptive to male commands, which women today find so obnoxious’, most especially the ‘master–slave relationship, now … no longer suitable as a metaphor for relationship to God’ (Johnson 2004: 85, 95). What Betsy Bauman-Martin (2009: 224–5) terms the ‘assumptions, language, and archetypes of romantic rape’ are for many feminist theologians, uncomfortably close to the surface in traditional readings of the scene. The Annunciation story can all too easily be read as a romance of a frightened girl, her body taken over by divine powers, consenting immediately to the use of her most intimate parts and then ultimately accepting that she must rejoice in her fate. As Sarah Boss comments, the ‘points of correspondence between the Annunciation story and rape narratives, even pornography’ are ‘disturbing’ especially when so much emphasis has traditionally been put on ‘maleness’ associated with God and ‘a particular importance is attached to Mary’s femininity’ (Boss 2000: 10, 12).
To many modern commentators, especially feminists, traditional patriarchal readings of the Annunciation scene have helped to restrict the place of women within Christianity and in particular denigrated women’s sexuality. As noted earlier, Christian authorities are anxious to remove any suggestion of eroticism from the Annunciation story. Beattie comments that the male-authored theological tradition has ‘regarded the female sexual body as the greatest threat’ to men’s ‘spiritual well-being’ (Beattie 2013: 98). The ‘encounter with the sexual female body’, she writes, ‘is one in which the masculine subject confronts the voracious emptiness at the limits of his own subjectivity, breaching the veils of romantic illusion to penetrate the horror of nothing beyond’ (Beattie 2002b: 32). Mary’s body was transformed into a sacred space, one without the dangers and demands of real women’s permeable bodies. In medieval representations her actual physical body was only selectively acknowledged, often seemingly reduced to a face, two hands, two breasts (sometimes only one), and a miraculously intact hymen. Despite its evocation of conception, virginity, and birthing, the intimate details of such female experiences were kept as distant as possible from the images or verbal descriptions of the Virgin—particularly when the mechanics of conception were considered. Orthodox speculations about the mechanism of conception and birth seem ludicrous in the light of the scientific understanding but they also emerge from a dark psychological place, from what Jane Caputi labels ‘gynophobic, misogynist, and frankly infantile’ (and again, predominantly perhaps exclusively, male) fantasies, underlain by a ‘masculine inability to face the mother, horror at femaleness, and fantasies of heroic slaughter of the feminine’ (Caputi 2001: 4).
Another culturally powerful and yet also, morally ambiguous, metaphor explicitly within the Annunciation story concerns Mary’s youth and perpetual virginity. Luke speaks of Mary as a young woman, but early elaborations, from the Protevangelium on are more specific, most asserting that Mary is between twelve and fifteen. Early in its history, the dominant reading of the scene became that Mary had no experience of sexual intercourse or, to most commentators, even any sexual desires. Louise Kaplan speaks of the common ‘child as salvation’ psychological motif, and historically, the ease of reversion to ‘dichotomous and caricatured gender ideals of childhood … the infantile gender stereotypes of feminine purity and innocence’ (Kaplan 1991:405, 521). Some commentators, anxious to avoid connotations of Mary as pre-pubescent, have argued that it was expected in that culture for a girl to marry around puberty, and further, that Joseph as an old man (a detail not found in the Gospel but in the Protevangelium) would be incapable of sexual intimacies. The ideal of an innocent young girl, at once not only sexually untouched but actually pre-sexual is a recurring male fantasy that can be seen across many cultures: it is found in Greek romances, medieval martyr stories, Renaissance pastoral, Shakespearean comedy and romance (and some tragedies), many nineteenth-century novels, not to mention Nabokov’s Lolita and a popular strain of modern popular culture. It is, Klaus Theweleit comments, one of the most regressive inhabitants of ‘the lumber room of patriarchal historical fantasies’ (Theweleit 1987: I. 168).
Scopophilia, an obsession with looking—with ample documentation from clinical studies and indeed the whole history of Western culture—is another predominantly male (or predominantly male-created and authorized) fantasy that has underpinned the long fascination with the Annunciation scene. It is not incidental, many feminist theologians argue, that given the overwhelmingly masculinist structures of authority in Christianity, we are positioned as voyeurs, watching, with Gabriel, for Mary’s response, waiting for the reactions of a young girl to an angel. Will she say yes? Can she refuse? It is the brilliant paucity of detail in the Lukan account—it is often remarked that Luke is the most self-consciously ‘literary’ of the Gospels—that places us in the voyeur’s role, attempting to oversee what happens by means of concentrated and penetrative (and supervised) looking. The psychologist Robert Stoller terms scopophilia a deeply rooted reaction formation that seeks to compensate for the fear of the overwhelming power of another, characteristically though by no means universally, an admired and powerful mother figure. Inherently it is a defensive act, acknowledging the (fantasized) absolute power of the object of gaze and finding ways to keep its power less threatening (Stoller 1975: 109).
Such speculations on some of the stories behind the Annunciation story help us understand how the residual interpretation has maintained a remarkable cultural hegemony for 1500 years and beyond, even as the moral and ontological consequences of ‘disenchantment’ have become more forceful. For most pre-Enlightenment Christians, the Annunciation was an event. It occurred within history, which was moving towards a providentially guided end, with the scene as one central landmark within a divinely ordained pattern.
The swirling and contradictory process of gradual ‘dis-enchantment’ of the Annunciation in the post-medieval world is strikingly epitomized by the modern German painter Gerhard Richter who claimed he ‘imitated’ a postcard of Titian’s 1530 San Rocco Annunciation, and produced a series of paintings entitled Verkündigung nach Tizian (the Annunciation after Titian) in which the figures of Mary and Gabriel were, over the course of five canvases, gradually dissolved and smeared into textured swipes of colour. Representations of the Annunciation have inevitably wrestled with the challenge of giving artistic expression to transcendent truths and with the mystery of representation itself; Richter’s gradual dissolving of the possibility of depicting the scene marks what he saw as the end of painting in post-modernity and (particularly relevant here) the fading and blurring of the Annunciation story over the past few hundred years (Richter 2009: 85–9). The metaphorical suggestiveness of Richter’s sequence illustrates a complex process of ideological change that does not happen overnight, but it provides a window into the complexity and contradictions that were erupting in the early modern period as traditions clashed, forcing—for many, an inevitable if often reluctant—examination of the very roots of belief.