Monday, September 4, 2017

Five Stages of Annunciation

Fra Roberto Caracciolo, prediche vulghare
1491
woodcut, Florence

"Sermons were a very important part of the painter's circumstances: preacher and picture were both part of the apparatus of a church, and each took notice of the other.  The fifteenth century was the last fling of the medieval type of popular preacher.  . . .  Fra Roberto Caracciolo da Lecce is a convenient example: Cosimo de' Medici thought he dressed too sharply for a priest, and his sense of the dramatic was strong  during a sermon on the Crusade he stripped off his habit to reveal, Erasmus noted with distaste, the crusader's livery and armour underneath  but his sermons as we have them are decorous enough.  . . .  Fra Roberto preaching on the Annunciation distinguishes three principal mysteries: (1) the Angelic Mission, (2) the Angelic Salutation and (3) the Angelic Colloquy.  Each of these is discussed under five main heads.  . . .  It is the third mystery, the Angelic Colloquy, that throws light on the fifteenth-century feeling for what, on the level of human emotion, happened to [the Virgin] in the crisis the painter had to represent.  Fra Roberto analyses the account of St. Luke (I: 26-38) and lays out a series of five successive spiritual and mental conditions or states attributable to Mary 

     1.    Conturbatio       Disquiet
     2.    Cogitatio            Reflection
     3.    Interrogatio       Inquiry
     4.    Humiliatio         Submission
     5.    Meritatio           Merit

The last of the five Laudable Conditions, Meritatio, followed after the departure of Gabriel, and belongs with representations of the Virgin on her own, the type now called Annunziata; the other four  successively Disquiet, Reflection, Inquiry and Submission  were divisions within the sublime narrative of Mary's response to the Annunciation that very exactly fit the painted representations . . . "

– Michael Baxandall, from Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972)

CONTURBATIO  DISQUIET

Filippo Lippi
Annunciation (Disquiet)
ca. 1445
oil on panel
Martelli Chapel, San Lorenzo, Florence

Sandro Botticelli
Annunciation (Disquiet)
1489
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Parmigianino
Annunciation (Disquiet)
ca. 1528-29
etching, engraving
Philadelphia Museum of Art



COGITATIO  REFLECTION

Fra Carnevale
Annunciation (Reflection)
ca. 1445-50
tempera on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joos van Cleve
Annunciation (Reflection)
ca. 1525
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Correggio
Annunciation (Reflection)
ca. 1522-25
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



INTERROGATIO  INQUIRY

Alesso Baldovinetti
Annunciation (Inquiry)
1447
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Filippo Lippi
Annunciation (Inquiry)
1437-39
tempera on panel
Frick Collection, New York

Vittore Carpaccio
Annunciation (Inquiry)
1504
oil and tempera on canvas
Ca' d'Oro, Venice



HUMILIATIO  SUBMISSION


Fra Angelico
Annunciation (Submission)
ca. 1437-46
fresco
Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence

Gerard David
Annunciation (Submission)
1506
oil on panel
(half of diptych, Angel Gabriel on facing panel)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York



MERITATIO  MERIT


Antonello da Messina
Virgin Annunciate (Merit)
ca. 1473
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Fra Angelico
Virgin Annunciate (Merit)
ca. 1450-55
tempera on panel
Detroit Institute of Arts

Facial expression is a bad guide to the emotional lives of these long-ago painted people. Traditions of gesture, posture, and costume carried far more of the burden that we (conditioned by the cinematic close-up) now expect the face to bear.