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Hail Mary
Nazarene and Pre-Raphaelite Annunciations
German Nazarenes in the first, English Pre-Raphaelites in the second half of the 19 th
century, were respectively a Romantic and a Decadent way to revisit medieval and
Renaissance art. Both groups of artists – some of them, men of letters too – were associated
like confraternities more than as artistic schools or cultural movements. No doubt, the
Nazarenes had an influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet there are also differences between
them. Although opposing academic Neoclassicism, the “Brotherhood of St. Luke”
appreciated Raphael’s painting better than what the so called Pre-Raphaelites will do. More
religiously oriented, as their acquired name shows, and politically conservative, they did not
lack some nostalgic and utopian spirit at once. In their youth they migrated to Italy, attracted
by art history local vestiges and by its natural landscapes, as well as by a Catholic milieu.
Among them Franz Pforr, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld
and Johann von Schraudolph, are to be mentioned peculiarly in this context. The
Annunciation was an inevitable appointment, in their pictorial production of holy subjects.
Most Nazarene Annunciations share an architectonic figurative pattern made of arches, in
background or in foreground or else in both of them, circumscribing the scene, the
characters, the landscape, like in a theatre scene painting. Surely this scansion of the space
has its Renaissance inspiring models. But it looks also reflecting an idealistic influence, so
that the open architectural frame works as a distinction between an intimate “Ego” and a
natural “Not-Ego”. The sacred scene is like an interface between these levels of the Self.
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Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Die
Verkündigung
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Franz Pforr, Sulamith und Maria, detail
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secret of the virgin, making her so ineffably charming, is a presentiment of motherhood, the
presage of a latent world which should develop from her. She is the most proper likeness of
the future” (Fragments 729-34). The Romantic feeling of modernity, by the German poet,
evolves breaking away from the Enlightened one. The figure of the Virgin becomes an icon
of a possible alternative development, to which the meeting or reconciliation between
religion and philosophy, nature and art, might highly contribute. In his Hymns to the Night
issued in 1800, he expressly refers to so many artists trying to sound Mary’s mysteries, in
the history of art: “A thousand hands, devoutly tender,/ Have sought thy beauty to express,/
But none, oh Mary, none can render,/ As my soul sees, thy loveliness”.[1]
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti was son of an Italian patriot exile in England. Even more than
liberal patriotism, he inherited love to Italian art. With other English artists, in 1849 he
founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In theory at least, their Medievalism was so strict,
as to exclude Raphael from their historical pictorial inspiring models. Nevertheless, the
critic John Ruskin gave them an orientation to a modern symbolism and aestheticism. In
such a group, there was room for William Morris’ social nostalgic utopianism. And Dante
Gabriel was a poet too. In his sonnet firstly titled Ancilla Domini, later For An
Annunciation, Mary’s figure works as a hinge between an old and a new era: “She was
Faith’s present, parting what had been/ From what began with her, and is for aye./ On either
hand God’s twofold system lay:/ With meek bowed face a Virgin prayed between”.
The poem was written in 1849. In the handwritten original, its subtitle is “for an early
Florentine picture”. In the printed version the full title sounds For An Annunciation, Early
German. What is a clue of various influences on the artist, when he went to paint his Ecce
Ancilla Domini (London: Tate Gallery; 1850). In the famous picture, the perception of the
Annunciate is changing, from a state of humble acceptance prevalent in the past to one
almost of fear at present, in front of the announcing angel: from an attitude of humiliatio to
one of conturbatio, to use late medieval definitions. Crouched on her bed within her
chamber, the girl cowers against a wall, casting down her eyes. She is staring into a vacuum,
like into a prevision of what Gabriel does not dare to tell, that some day her “joyful
mystery” will convert into a sorrowful one. “Since first her task began/ She hath known all”,
we can read in For a “Virgin & Child” by Michael Angelo, another Rossetti’s sonnet.[2]
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E. C. Burne-Jones,
Annunciation
Bereft of his usual wings, even the angel looks “human, too human”, here
paraphrasing Friedrich W. Nietzsche. The sensual realism of this depiction was a
disconcerting novelty, a signal of the ending Romanticism and of a forthcoming Decadence,
as conventional seasons of Western art and culture. Indeed, in Ecce Ancilla Domini of
medieval precedents there is a vague memory, surely not some idealized but irrecoverable
serenity. That is, sometimes between theory and creativity there is a fertile gap. Other
Rossetti’s Annunciations were more traditional, less disquieting but less impressive too.
Such are not few Pre-Raphaelite pictures of the same genre, with some remarkable
exceptions. The most interesting is an Annunciation by Edward C. Burne-Jones, in the Lady
Lever Art Gallery at Liverpool (1876-79). This is an admirable philological work,
proceeding from Byzantine icons through Fra Angelico’s painting to an original synthesis.
The iconography is an ancient one, so defined of “Mary at the well or at the fountain”,
inspired by apocryphal Gospels. The same typology may be found in two Annunciations,
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respectively by Arthur Hacker (London: Tate Gallery; 1892) and Sidney Harold Meteyard
as illustrator of The Golden Legend, a collection of verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Both painters were strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite lesson, and a poem by
Longfellow was strictly related with that type of representation. Meteyard illustrated
Longfellow’s poem Mary at the Well in 1910. Yet, firstly, it had been issued in 1872, what
does mean that both Burne-Jones and Hacker could have read and appreciated it. In this
fiction, the North-American poet makes the Virgin herself narrate the event, describing its
atmosphere shared between a natural and a supernatural dimension. According to the
apocryphal tradition, at least its initial setting is in open hair, rather than in an interior so as
suggested by canonical Luke’s Gospel: “Along the garden walk, and thence/ Through the
wicket in the garden fence/ I steal with quiet pace,/ My pitcher at the well to fill,/ That lies
so deep and cool and still/ In this sequestered place.// These sycamores keep guard around;/
I see no face, I hear no sound,/ Save bubblings of the spring,/ And my companions, who,
within,/ The threads of gold and scarlet spin,/ And at their labor sing”.[3]
Instead of a fenced garden, in Burne-Jones’ Annunciation the open air setting is a
walled court. What allows him to depict a classical architecture around the scene, as in a
Renaissance fashion. On the front of a building in background, we can discern a marble
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relief. Just like in old Italian paintings by Fra Angelico or by Giovanni di Paolo, or else by
Lorenzo di Credi, it represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden
after the original sin. That is the nostalgia of a Paradise lost, which Mary as a “new Eve” is
about to concur to recover, in the perspective of the divine incarnation and redemption. In
the form of a wall fresco within an interior, such a symbolic picture inside the picture may
be also detected in a beautiful Annunciation titled Ancilla Domini, by the Australian painter
Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia; ca. 1896).
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the Danish painter Carl Heinrich Bloch, an oil on copper executed in a late Nazarene
manner but showing an exotic scenery in background (Salt Lake City: Hope Gallery; 1875).
Probably, the best open air Annunciation is by John William Waterhouse (London:
Sotheby’s Collection; 1914). It is a ripe and coloured fruit of Pre-Raphaelitism.
Seldom we have a neutral background, such as in an Annunciation by the U. S. artist
Mary Lizzie Macomber, exhibited in the Fine Arts Palace during the 1893 Exposition at
Chicago. Often, an internal setting continued to recur. If Nazarenes had travelled to Italy,
two artists went as far as the Holy Land to improve such an interiority. It became not only a
formal but also a substantial one. Mostly alien from exoticism, their trips were a search for
authenticity and for a truer realism. They were the French painter James Jacques Joseph
Tissot and the Afro-American Henry Ossawa Tanner. Currently, their respective
Annunciations can be admired in the Brooklyn Museum (ca. 1886-96) and in the Museum
of Art at Philadelphia (1898). In both pictures, doors or windows are not visible. In a poor
oriental chamber, details are the strict necessary. The only gleam is shed by the angel,
identifiable as a winged shape in the case of Tissot, as a source of light in that of Tanner.
The Virgin is seated on a floor carpet in the former, on her bed in the latter. We
cannot see her full face, in the depiction by Tissot. Yet the shape of the angel has a woman
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face, as to suggest an inmost specularity between the two figures, like between the
unconscious and the conscience of a same person (at Tissot’s times, the birth of
psychoanalysis was at hand). As to Tanner’s Mary, she is one of the most touching
representations in art history. She stares at the angelic appearance with a perplexed, more
than alarmed or inquiring, expression. Her clenched hands show the fingers intertwining in
her lap, betraying her thoughts. Especially in this painting, besides the religious announcing
a possible better world, indeed a secular denunciation of the same old one is transparent.
That drives our minds back to the Magnificat, soon after the narration of the
Annunciation in Luke’s Gospel. Then a now pregnant Madonna speaks to our hearts,
exhorting to renounce any dangerous, even unaware selfishness: “[God] hath shewed
strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath
put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the
hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away” (1: 51-53, K. J. Version).
Inside Western civilization likely Tanner’s Annunciation is an early learned expression of a
new subjectivity, a step toward a more complex and broad identity, somewhat renouncing to
narrow ones. That is, once more art itself works as a form of anticipatory consciousness.
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Finally, let us return to the English ambience of Pre-Raphaelitism. In front of the
overcoming Modernism, Waterhouse’s Annunciation is an extreme episode of resistance
and compromise at the same time. There, Gabriel and Mary are facing one another like
actors of an old drama on the stage, as spirits of Middle Ages and of a popular modernity.
Actually, she looks like coming out from a magazine cover or a silent film. The “Golden
Age”, or the Belle Époque, is at an end. 1914 is the first year of the First World War. Dating
to the same year, Claughton Pellew’s Annunciation represents a divergent solution, less
seductive and more surreal. Almost an absence of colours, a drawing reduced to the
essential, a residual inspiration by Italian late Medieval or early Renaissance models. The
setting is in Virgin’s chamber. An open door shows a rural and artisan background scene.
The angel peeps into from a small window. But his and Mary’s gazes meet no more. Here,
rarefaction and dissolution go hand in hand. It is about the death of an iconographic genre.
Of course an archetype like that owns resources, which can develop beyond, even
against the known tradition. So, we have several examples in the contemporary art. No
doubt, further ones will follow. Early Annunciations painted in a Modernist manner can be
ascribed to Maurice Denis, French artist of the group Les Nabis: Annonciation (Paris:
Musée National d’Art Modern; 1912) and Annonciation sur les arcades à la fleur-de-lys
(private collection, 1913). Yet we like to focus on a witness, coming from outside our
civilization. In a Nativity Annunciation by the living Chinese painter He Qi, Mary is
combing her hair, when an angel leans out from a mirror offering a flower by his hand.
Well, it looks a way to mean she is an universal image of the soul, of each one’s conscience
at its best, while announcing to itself which everybody wishes to be. Just a moment before
the choice that may determine our beings, like Our Lady did once upon a time and forever.
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Claughton Pellew, Annunciation
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by the author, the change of some titles from an early Italian reference to later German or
Flemish ones.
[3] Henry W. Longfellow, Mary at the Well, in The Nativity: A Miracle-Play, in the
Collection Christus: A Mystery, Part II: The Golden Legend, 1872 (in The Complete
Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Laurel, NY: Lightyear Press, 1993).
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