to the haloes
to the gold cloth hanging behind the Virgin on her throne chair.
Gold makes the hands of God sending down the shaft of golden light behind the foreground columns,
Gold is the sun from which the dove of the Holy Spirit is sent down from heaven to the ear of the Virgin to tell her of her miraculous conception.
Gold is the embroidery on the gown of the angel and gold is the embroidery on the hem of the Virgin's robe.
and blue the undergarment of the angel.
And a heavy lapis lazuli blue color infuses all of the interior vaults of the arched room enclosing the Angel and Virgin. Sprinkled with white stars to simulate heaven, Fra Angelico is reminding the viewer that this is not an ordinary house but a holy one.
Only the best materials are used for the Virgin for she is the Queen of Heaven. Fra Angelico pays her homage by dressing her in the most precious ground gem of blue.
Blue and gold, the most luxurious colors of royalty and heaven. While the story is depicted in a simple arcaded hallway open to a garden, the figures on the right, the Angel and the Virgin, and the vaults above them, are robed in the richest of elements to speak of their holiness and the sacred nature of their story. The event is written down in the New Testament of the Bible, in Luke, Chapter 1, lines 26-38. The Angel Gabriel is sent down from God to the house of the Virgin Mary to tell her that she will be impregnated by God and will bear the son of God, Jesus Christ.
Unlike some other Annunciations images from the Italian Renaissance, this
one includes the Old Testament story on the left, the New Testament story on
the right. Both stories have a male and female figure, but the Adam and Eve
story is in the background of the pictorial space because that story is further in the past. Fra Angelico does what many artists do in the Renaissance: they wish
to make parallel the Old and New Testaments in an effort to order history. For
the Italian Renaissance painter and viewer, the Christian story is an answer to a question or problem posed in the Old Testament. For them the Jewish story of
original sin and Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise had set up an anxiety
until Christ arrived as the Messiah and God's son. Christ gave Christian viewers
a sense that they could be forgiven for original sin if they just believed in Jesus as Redeemer. For Christians in the 15th century and now, Christ gave his life so that people would be free of sin and so that they could have something to believe in after death, a resurrection, a new life.
So the fact that Adam and Eve are juxtaposed in this panel by Fra Angelico with Angel Gabriel (representing God) and Mary, Christ's mother, is perfectly logical; the artist is painting the QUESTION and the ANSWER. The QUESTION is the problem of sin caused by Adam and Eve having disobeyed God and having been thrown out of the Garden of Eden. That problem is DYING. The ANSWER is that God sends his only Son to earth in the uterus of Mary to be born as a human being and then to die to eliminate people's sin for them so that they won't have to die but will have ETERNAL LIFE.
And Fra Angelico makes clear that God is the manager of all of this
history; God's face hovers patiently and permanently in a bas-relief on the building housing Angel Gabriel and Mary, just between the two figures.
This magical moment assuages the pain of the rejection of Adam and Eve in the story on the left. Tellingly, as a Dominican monk, Fra Angelico cannot paint Adam and Eve naked. He clothes them and paints fig leaves on top of the clothes, making doubly sure they acknowledge their nakedness underneath the clothing!
But in other ways he is following the tradition of linking indissolubly the Old and New Testament stories. We even read the panel left to right, as if reading a manuscript of the Bible from left to right, Old Testament first, Chapter 1 Genesis, and then the new Testament Luke, Chapter 1 afterwards.
As if needing reminders of why a person should believe in Christ as a savior, the viewer looks first at the casting out of the first two people created,
and sees the sadness on their faces at having to leave the beautiful, perfect Garden. Then, with the announcement that Mary will be pregnant with new life,
the viewer feels the joy of the Angel's wings, the acceptance of unexpected news
by Mary, the simplicity of the message of hope.
The sexuality of Gabriel is something that is hard not to think about when peering at a scene of a male-looking creature approaching a female in submission. But fifteenth-century believers thought that angels were neuter and
so in a scene fraught with sexual tension, where the whole point is that we are witnessing Mary being impregnated, the sexuality of the moment is slanted sideways by knowing it is not Gabriel who gives her a child. And God comes to visit her in words, in the shape of a dove, and in the shape of hands and a head,
in parts of a body that can never threaten to be a whole male entity. And the
largest male-like figure in the scene, Gabriel, is taken out of the sexual equation
by virtue of his virtue, neuterness, much as St. Joseph is taken out of the sexual
equation by virtue of his only being Jesus's father in name only in scenes of the Nativity that feature Joseph.
The Annunciation story is told in paint and sculpture over and over again
in the 15th century for many different reasons. For one thing, it is a scene that is not violent or filled with death, as the Massacre of the Innocents is or the Crucifixion is. On the other hand it gets repeated because it is the scene of most sexual excitement for artists and viewers without overtly exposing sexuality. Another reason it gets repeated is that it is a scene of a miracle full of magic.
The story of a virgin who doesn't lose her virginity even though she is impregnated by God is a story that tests everyone's faith, but in doing so, it represents exactly why people go to church in the first place, because they want something extraordinary to believe in. The viewer gets to enjoy the sexual possibility of the moment before intercourse between human male and female figures while at the same time negating all sexual possibility between those two figures - a holy scene masking something else harder to talk about, love-making.
In innocent Fra Angelico's treatment of the scene it becomes a story about love in its purist form. He is able to convey the sweetness and joy of non-sexual love in the meeting and exchanges between Mary and the angel. By forcing the viewer to remember the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve, he
emphasizes in the foreground the reason for his own faith. The story of Jesus offered Christians the possibility of life after death and was a hopeful answer to the problem caused by Adam and Eve's disobeyal of God's law.
What, then, is the magpie doing in the scene? Where's Waldo? Can you
find the magpie? There he is, bird on a wire, observing the impregnation taking
place directly under him.
He is the observant bird, attracted by the gold metal, as all magpies are,
but his colors give away his other symbolic role. The magpie is black and white,
and black and white are the robes that Dominican monks wear, so the magpie is
appropriate in a panel painted for the main altar of San Domenico di Fiesole,
the major Dominican church on the road from Florence to Fiesole. He is the stand-in for the monks like Fra Angelico, who was himself a Dominican. The money came from Cosimo de' Medici to pay for all the gold and lapis lazuli, but Cosimo, not a monk, was enriching the Dominican monastery that was out of town until he got tired of trekking up the hill towards Fiesole
Was the magpie a way for Angelico to remember which church this
panel was going to as the main altar? since his workshop was working on many different projects at this point? or just a way to insert his own monastic
identity into the holy scene of announcing Christ's birth to his mother? Remember the magpie, remember the Dominicans, who wore black and white. Remember the church dedicated to Mary and run by Dominicans. The magpie, as inobtrusive as it is, reminds us of all that. As one of the only specific additions to the story that does not get mentioned in Luke, it is a way of making the story ordinary, were it not for the magic of its essence. If Mary lives in a world where there are magpies, she was an ordinary human being who experienced the most remarkable change in her life that led to a change for most believers in
Western Europe during the period when Fra Angelico was painting. But,
according to Italian folklore, the magpie was present at the Crucifixion and
did not sing. (My thanks to Professor Victor Carrabino for this information.) Is this magpie a premonition of Christ's death then? He certainly looks over and down as if noticing Mary's impregnation and her crossed arms.
This magpie stands in for the Dominicans who wished to be part of the
celebration of this event in history; by placing their bird, the bird who dressed
like they did, into the Annunciation scene, Fra Angelico allows himself and
his fellow monks to join in the story of Jesus from the very beginning, but it is not just Jesus that interests them here. The Dominican monks of Fiesole dedicated themselves to Mary and to her life. The church in Fiesole is devoted to her. This bird is displaying the devotion of those monks to the figure of the Virgin, plain and simple. He faces only Mary in this scene. But as celibate monks, the Dominicans in this church would be giving up their own chance to impregnate, so this panel may be in some ways a vicarious pleasure.
Without any other clues, the predella panels for this main altarpiece give us affirmation of the monks' attachment to Mary as their spiritual bride. All of the predella panels tell stories about Mary and these are painted by Fra Angelico, too. Their meaning is lost in the Prado Museum without a context now, but originally these stories would have inspired the monks to go about their daily duties, knowing that they were contributing in their own little ways to the devotion to this holy woman.
Five predella panels still exist in the Prado Museum attached to the original altar.
Written in Latin on the frame across the top of the predella scenes are the words:
Ave Maria Gratia Plena, Dominus tecum: benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus.
Hail Mary, full of Grace, God be with you, blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed be the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Below the words said by the Angel to the Virgin are five predella panels.
Left to right the subjects are:
In the first panel Mary is born to St. Anne, who lies in her bed in the far left scene; next on the right Mary marries Joseph in a ceremony that takes place in front of a church facade that looks much like the church of San Miniato al Monte in Florence or perhaps what St. Peter's in Rome looked like in Fra Angelico's time. The high priest dressed in green joins the two while the suitor whose rod did not flower breaks it over his knee on the left.
The Visitation is the story where Mary goes to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is
6-month's pregnant with John the Baptist. John leaps in the womb when Mary
arrives which is later recognized as his realizing that Mary was pregnant with the Messiah.
Italian light by Angelico and that same light falls over the portico in front of the church where a woman seems to be ringing the church bells in joy for the two
pregnancies. No coincidence that the front of the painted church looks just like the portico and facade of the Church of San Domenico in Fiesole:
The next event in the Life of Mary is the birth of Jesus and the adoration of the
Magi:
to the middle-aged king. The youngest king's crown is in the grass near his long sleeve while the two older kings sport theirs on their heads. The entourage stands
at left with camels and horses. As if that were not enough to pack into a small
predella panel, Fra Angelico also hints at angels on the roof of the manger and
an angel telling the shepherds on the right. The artist also shows his true skill at foreshortening in the figure of the youngest king seen from the back, the ox and ass seen from the front, and the split-open manger whose sides protrude towards us.
The next scene is the Presentation in the Temple of the Christ Child.
Simeon, and Anna, who barely fits into the round temple precinct.
The last scene is the death of the Virgin whom the Church did not want to
portray as dying, so they entitled her death, the Sleeping of the Virgin, the Dormition.
priest (Peter?) reads the last rites from a book. On the left an angel holds a cross
and on the right an apostle hold a thurible, a censor. Thomas with dark beard
stands at her feet as her green girdle follows in a line from him to Mary. Thomas
was said to have been handed her girdle on her death. Above the group is an
array of blue angels ready to receive Mary in heaven.
Mary's BIRTH to DEATH is recorded in the stories of the lower panels
beneath the Annunciation panel. The Annunciation becomes the most important
event in her life since it is the largest central piece, but the monks would have been reassured by the minute documenting of her journey in time from before
Christ's birth (three left scenes, with the Virgin's birth an extension of the
marriage) to after his birth (three right scenes.) Looking at her submission to
the will of God in both the main altarpiece, where she is shown in the ACCEPTANCE STAGE, as well as in the predella stories, would have given
the monks who were devoted to her the courage to see their own lives from birth to death within the larger context of God's decisions. Mary is singled out in
the Annunciation scene for a particularly holy role, and the monks would certainly have wanted a particularly holy role for themselves, too. They could
put themselves into the history of Jesus' mother in the figure of the magpie,
as witness and observer. The play within a play is not just presented in
the predella church within the real church (something lost in Madrid,) but
in the Magpies paying homage before another Magpie paying homage to the
Virgin in the main altarpiece story.
original sins. The magpie is so taken with the golden scene that he doesn't
even look their way. Life without the possibility of having children
is hard work because life-affirming sin is always in the background. Best to
have something beautiful to look at to distract from the real desire.
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