Van Eyck's Annunciation

The Annunciation is a particularly good showpiece for van Eyck's obsession with the texture of fabrics: both the Virgin Mary and Gabriel are swathed in lavish robes that fold and hang with surreal, wholly gratuitous complexity. Van Eyck painted clothes, a critic once observed, the way other artists paint mountain ranges.
The problem is, once you get past the first wash of amazement the painting becomes reticent and impersonal. The Annunciation is one of the most frequently painted subjects in Christian art--it derives from Luke 1:26-38, where Gabriel tells Mary she will bear the Christ child, and Mary meekly replies, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord"--and you look in vain for an individualizing edge in van Eyck's version. All you find after
an extended study are a lot of inscrutable details. If Mary is supposed to be a humble resident of some backwater Judean village, for instance, why is she wearing a circlet studded with pearls? She seems to have been doing very well for herself before Gabriel showed up. And if this is the moment that she first learns her destiny, then why is the setting so plainly a Christian church, with Jesus in stained glass on the back wall--aren't we getting a little ahead of the story?
Of course we know that all these details have some sort of allegorical significance. That's just what's so tiresome about medieval art: there's always that vast weight of church authority bearing down on artist and spectator alike. Every painting is overloaded with the same clutter of officially sanctioned symbolism, assembled mechanically, without regard to logic or emotional common sense. Van Eyck's Annunciation accumulates the same crowd of usual suspects you find in a thousand other Annunciations: that incongruous dove floating arbitrarily over Mary's head like a lightbulb going off in a comic strip, the angel making his vaguely salacious gesture of pointing toward heaven, Mary wearing a bland, unsurprised expression of pious acceptance--in van Eyck's version you'd swear she's bored to tears. Whatever personal or private meanings the painting may have, they're encoded in a visual system so tedious and oppressive we can barely bring ourselves to contemplate it.
Still, if we assume that an artist like van Eyck found his religious beliefs enlivening rather than crushing, we might be able to consider some of the theological background without dread.
Let's take the story of the Annunciation< as it appears in the Gospel of Luke. The important point about it is that it's only one of several curious folktale-ish scenes scattered through the narrative of Christ's passion: Luke had a taste for the fanciful and poetic (so much so that some of the sterner early Christians thought his Gospel should be left out of the New Testament), and he wove these stories into a kind of decorative floral border around the main text. This is essentially how van Eyck regarded his Annunciation. It was never meant to be viewed as an independent work. Its small size and unusual shape can only mean that it was originally a side panel flanking a much larger central painting, now lost--subject unknown, except that it had to have been directly about Christ. Nor is it possible to be sure how many side paintings there were; the Annunciation was probably part of a triptych, but van Eyck's altarpiece at Ghent is made up of a central painting of the Adoration of the Lamb surrounded by a galaxy of 23 separate smaller paintings (including a four-panel Annunciation scene). In other words, the Annunciation as we have it was supposed to be viewed as only a minor offshoot of the main
subject.
In van Eyck's time Biblical stories were told and retold constantly--painted, sermonized, allegorized, dramatized. The result was that every episode in the great narrative, no matter how marginal or subsidiary, accumulated its own comet's tail of folk legends and metaphors and fanciful speculations. Van Eyck's Annunciation is crowded with dozens of examples of Annunciation lore. Mary was supposed to be a modest and studious girl, for instance, so the tradition was to show her (as van Eyck does) reading the scriptures when Gabriel arrives. Another tradition was that she was raised in a temple, so medieval artists often set the scene in the best local equivalent--a church. Lilies were a symbol of virginity, so there's a vase of lilies at Mary's feet (in the Ghent Annunciation Gabriel hands Mary a bouquet of lilies). It was said that Mary conceived at the exact moment she said "Behold"--that's why the dove (symbolizing the Holy Ghost) is descending toward her along a golden line of light. The idea that she could remain a virgin even though she'd conceived a child was sometimes illustrated by sunlight passing through glass without destroying its purity--and van Eyck's painting happens to have the divine rays coming through high upper windows of clear glass.
I could go on, but you get the idea. When the artists of van Eyck's time set out to paint any scene from the Bible, they had an elaborate repertoire of visual cliches to draw on. It wasn't completely systematized; a lot of alternative traditions were heaped together, so that van Eyck could, without any psychic dissonance, set this Annunciation in a church and the Ghent Annunciation in Mary's home. But even if he had some latitude in his choice of symbols, we're still left with the question of why he used a standardized symbolic vocabulary at all. What is this particular assemblage of prefab meanings supposed to convey?
But with the Annunciation, we're at an earlier, less exalted peak of spiritual intensity. Christ is being announced, but he hasn't arrived yet; so there are no vistas of wonderment before us. Instead we see an interior scene enclosed by windows of opaque bull's-eye glass. The space is rendered with van Eyck's usual hallucinatory exactitude: you can tell that the ceiling needs a little repair, and the frescoes dimly visible on the back wall could probably stand a touch-up, and the stained-glass window is second-rate--probably it was executed by the local hack glassblower rather than an imported master craftsman. But the rich textures of the wider world have been carefully reduced to a hint of potential: you have to look closely behind Gabriel's wing to catch a glimpse, through the led diamond panes in the next room, of the meticulously detailed house fronts across the street. (Like all of van Eyck's settings, by the way, this scene is out of his own head--nobody has ever succeeded in matching it with a real church.)
At the same time a kind of latent symbolic energy is forcing its way into the frame. The scene is scattered with signs and portents: there's the standard Annunciation symbolism of course, but it's complicated by other symbols that point directly to Christ himself. The lilies, for instance, are Easter lilies--an extra edge of meaning within the ordinary one. The stained-glass window on the rear wall shows Christ perched on a globe of the world. And there's the church setting itself, whose very existence is a symbolic reminder of Christ's Passion. Meanwhile yet another layer of symbolism seeps up from below: the floor tiles are carved with freakishly intricate designs that prove to be a series of Old Testament scenes interspersed with medallions bearing the signs of the zodiac. There are no repeats in the tiles we can see, and I believe we're supposed to imagine that the whole floor makes up a complete set of scriptural illustrations--add the zodiac signs and you have a pretty strong symbol for the earth and the cosmos together. In other words, the scene is a kind of iceberg field containing submerged references to the whole of the Old and New Testaments, the history of the human race, and the design of the heavens. This slightly run-down small-town church encloses the entire world--a world in which the glory of the divine is only beginning to be revealed.
The light of heaven is clearly emerging around the figure of the archangel Gabriel. Other artists might have been content to represent his celestial glamour by means of his iridescent wings or his eerie smile, but van Eyck was only getting warmed up with incidental details like those. He expends his full powers on Gabriel's outfit. Gabriel traditionally wore white robes for the Annunciation; sometimes he would arrive in a tasteful pastel robe with a gold fringe. Van Eyck drapes him in a spectacular floral, gold-embroidered velvet antependium with a staggering jeweled border; by a rough guess given the portions on view, the whole thing would have to contain at least a hundred large gemstones and more than a thousand pearls. It's such a heedlessly munificent explosion of wealth that it seems to have inadvertently scattered pearls into Mary's plain circlet.
This is the aspect of van Eyck's imagination that people find most troublesome: his tendency to equate heaven with such a vulgar symbol of earthly wealth as jewelry. It goes together with another of his more dubious tendencies--not on view in the Annunciation, but unavoidable in some of his major works: a casual willingness to ennoble in paint some of the more disagreeable people in the local power structure. Chancellor Rolin was evidently nobody you wanted to cross; the Canon van der Paele (guest star of another Virgin and Child painting) wasn't much more sympathetic; and the church worthies included in the Ghent Adoration are as disagreeable as the tough guys you'd meet in a mob lineup. But van Eyck painted them all, evidently without irony, as though he didn't accept just the church's notion of acceptable iconography, but its own complacent assessment that wealth and power are proof of God's grace. Leonardo Da Vinci, Annunciation 1472-75 circa Tempera on wood, cm 98x217 Inv. 1890, n. 1618 The work came to the Uffizi in 1867 from the monastery of San Bartolomeo of Monteoliveto, near Florence. It was ascribed to Domenico Ghirlandaio until 1869, when some critics recognised it as a youthful work by Leonardo, executed around 1472-1475, when he was still an apprentice in the workshop of his master, Andrea del Verrocchio. But the symbolism in each is very complex. But I have noticed the contrast between Northern painters and the Italians is that the Northern painters e.g Jan Van Eyck concentrates on expressive detail, in comparison to Giotto who follows religious meaning. Leonardo Da Vinci on the other hand uses rich brilliant colours to express his thoughts and ideas. He uses symbolism extensively to get the religious meaning across to the viewer.
He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives.
-Luke iv. 18- Flowers associated with Mary, the
Mother of Jesus, are deeply intertwined with ancient lore that can be traced back beyond the Christian era. In heathen mythology almost The lily was also sacred to Buddha and Brahma, the basil to Vishnu and the henna plant to Mahomet But there are certain plants which, above all others, are associated in legend and folklore with the virgin Mary, and whose popular names still indicate this connection.
The two flowers beyond all others that are emblematic of the
Blessed Virgin are the rose in the East and the lily in the West. At the Feast of the Visitation (July 2), instituted by Pope Urban VI to commemorate the visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, the Madonna
Lily (Lilium candidum) is emblematic of Mary's virginity, and almost every painting purporting to depict this visit has a vase of these lilies, usually with three blossoms, included. The pure white sepals are symbolic of her spotless body and the six golden anthers of her soul sparkling with divine light. The rose is also used. At the
Feast of the Assumption, or miraculous ascent of Mary into heaven, the white virgin's bower is widely used.

In depicting the Annunciation, early painters represented the angel Gabriel carrying either a scepter or a spray of olive. Later the church instructed artists always to depict him with a spray of
Madonna Lilies in his hand, and this edict was followed scrupulously in the later period of Italian church art. Usually the spray consisted of three blossoms, suggesting the Trinity. The lily was symbolic of innocence, purity and virginity, and often, when it was depicted or used on an altar, it had the stamens removed lest they
"defile" the virgin chastity of the blossom. At the Feast of the
Annunciation today, white irises, flowering almonds and white narcissi are also used.

According to a well-known legend, St. Thomas, not believing the reports about the resurrection of the Virgin, had her tomb opened.
Inside, instead of her body, he found the tomb to be filled with lilies and roses.

The rose is used in Italy all through the month of May.
Everyone who can secure roses, places them in his oratory or on a table. Both red and white roses have been emblematic of the Virgin since very early times, and were dedicated to Venus before that.
When St. Dominic instituted the devotion of the Rosary, he recognized this symbolism and indicated the separate prayers as tiny roses. May - the Month of May or Madonna's Month - was originally sacred to Flora, Roman goddess of flowers and of spring.

The Madonna lily is also associated with the Visitation when Mary strode across the countryside to visit her aged cousin Elizabeth, also with child. Again practically every painting depicting this meeting of joy depicts three blossoms of lilies. The pure white sepals are symbolic of her spotless body and the six golden anthers of her soul sparkling with divine light.

Furthermore the Madonna lily symbolises Mary's immaculate conception, as does the lily among thorns. The Assumption Lily, a lily that blooms at the time of the Dormition on the 15th August represents the Assumption, as does the white virgin's bower, widely used. The rose also depicts this miraculous ascent of Mary into heaven.
The Lily-of-the Valley represents Mary's humility throughout all her life, beginning with her receiving graciously the message of Gabriel.