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I owe this picture to the pointer from Iain who commented on the Annunciation post a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't seen it before and Iain's comments gives a helpful and telling comparison between this Rossetti picture and that of Poussin.

Not disagreeing with you Iain, but wonder if the idealised face of a super-saint, or the scared look of a young woman, could ever adequately capture in one image the mystery of the Annunciation. What would the human face look like, giving visual expression to an encounter that rewrote her life hopes and reconfigured the story of the universe.

The classic images are here – the blue curtain of heaven juxtaposed to a window looking our on a tree and the sky, the natural and the heavenly worlds. The white lilies, emblem of the Virgin and offered as gift and a seal of the providence of God and the permission of Mary. The angel stands on light, flames of light, purity and guidance, presence and transience. And the angel's face though not unkind, is held in the perfect poise of one for whom refusal would be impossible, and beside them the red panel of sacrifice, itself ornamented with lilies.

Rossetti captures the ambiguity of Mary, her hesitant yes, the inner turmoil of fear and trust, of tempting denial and kindled devotion, of adolescent uncertainty mixed with adolescent recklessness and risk. And there can be no doubting the reality and personal cost of that risk. Scandal, misunderstanding, family disgrace, unconvincing explanations citing angels, a hurt and angry betrothed, and a future of hope overshadowed with dread. The halos are prominent, definitive of holiness, symbols of divine calling and readiness to serve. By the time the baby is born, she will not have her troubles to seek. Like many a mother, then and now, the yes to new life means no to so much of her own life.

You can find out more about this remarkable painting here. David Goff explains the technique, the composition, and gives some comment on the biblical allusions. There are even several questions at the end, to encourage you to think, while you look at the painting. 

I suspect you love this painting or it does nothing for you. But here's why I think it's an important portrayal of what on earth was going on at the Nativity. It is otherworldly, eerily strange, fantastic like a dream, psychologically potent with symbol. It makes Christmas seem miraculous, unreal in any empirical everyday sense that can be captured by realistic paintings, digital photography or satellite imaging. Trees and angels merge in an archway over the forest; cave and Magi and Joseph arch over the Madonna and child, and the Virgin herself is protectively arched over the baby. All is in shades of blue, ethereal, luminous with presences strange to the earth; the world has never seen anything like this.

What is happening here is unprecedented in the universe, and all the ways of human communication will be strained and refashioned in order to tell the story. Logic and science, poetry and art, words and music, ideas and images, the entire spectrum of human knowing and communicating will only be able to convey some sense of this vast mysterious happening when the story unfolds in the life of the child, and human voices are orchestrated in praise of this tiny, vulnerable gift of Gods self – "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,… and we beheld his glory", "wrapped in swaddling cloths, and lying in a manger."

This painting rebukes both our tendencies to sentimentalise and our complacent disinterest; it laughs at our logic and questions our reliance on graphic realism; it pulls us out of our technologically obsessed worldview and ignores our lust for control of knowledge and mastery of the world around us. This is the Nativity as subversive theology, the silvery monochrome medium conveying mystery far more effectively than colour, and the artist choosing a way to bypass our expectations and habits of thought about what on earth God was doing, entering Creation as a mortal child.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence…….

The Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones' "Angel Playing the Flageoloet" doesn't pretend to be theological. It doesn't need to be. An angel is a messenger from God, and the Christmas story wouldn't work without them. The annunciation to Mary, the sorting out of Jospeh, the cosmic orchestra at Bethlehem, the security branch facilitating the flight to Egypt, are all hinge points when heaven interrupts the earthly drama to redirect the plot.

Music is essential to the story – praise, joy, peace, – annunciation, communication, contemplation – these are almost the only words needed to define a good Christmas carol.

One of my occasional experiments is to look at a painting like this and decide which carol works best with it. "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is far too theologically and conceptually heavy for this one. The calypso carol too upbeat. Maybe "Love Came Down at Christmas"? Any suggestions for a carol that complements this rather gorgeous but not over-excited angel?

 
In 1505 Raphael painted one of the most beautiful religious images in all of art history. "The Madonna of the Meadow" is replete with devotional allusion, rich in symbolic theology and represents the highest level of aesthetic and creative genius in the service of the Christian story.

Though the dominant figure is the Madonna, the central foreground image is of Jesus and John, apparently playing a game with the cross – but John is kneeling and holds the cross steady as Jesus holds both the cross and his mother's arm.

The pyramid structure is repeated in several places. The Madonna is seated, indeed anchored as the supporting presence for Jesus and gazing downward at both infants. The two children make a second pyramid, and the city in the background a third. Whether or not this is a trinitarian allusion, it gives the painting a powerful sense of rootedness in earth. Raphael by this time was experimenting with a more realistically portrayed, earthed, this worldly approach. The Madonna is not in a holy building but of the world, the city, the rural landscape the sea.  Various commentators note that her smile is enigmatic, hesitant, somewhere between smile and frown, uncertainty suggesting contentment threatened by foreboding. Her head is framed against the sky and is above land and sea, a compositional statement that more than hints at transcendence.

The colours blue and red are painted with startling vivid boldness, redemption and eternity, sacrifice and heaven, enwrapped in the form of the Virgin. The contrasting greens, and they are multi-toned, again brings together the fertile and fruitful life of earth with the redemptive intentions of heaven. The two red poppies answer to the two children, both of whom will die in the outworking of the Gospel story and the redemptive purposes of heaven.

Once again beauty is in the service of theology, and theology shows itself fit subject for art. There are passages of sublime theology that bear repeated reading, analysis, contemplation, intellectual wrestling and spiritual surrender. Likewise those paintings which reveal what George Herbert prayed about his poems, "utmost art". Advent is a time for such richly provoked engagement, as beauty and truth combine.

This is one of those priceless scraps of preparatory work that displays the thought processes of a great artist. It's one of Leonardo da Vinci's studies, Designs for the Nativity or Adoration of the Christ Child", though it presents a number of studies on one sheet.

I don't know what eventually happened to these images, whether they were later incorporated into paintings, frescoes or sculpture - for myself, these are masterpieces in their own right. And the cluster of drawings are delicately textured essays in carbon which together present motherhood and childhood in aspects of tenderness, joy and concentrated attentiveness. Looking on the biblical art site you can browse hundreds of representations of the Nativity – this is to my eyes, and to my theological aesthetics, the most sublime depiction of Mary and Jesus, Virgin and child, protective love and vulnerable presence. In each image Mary is kneeling as she gazes, holds, reaches out towards, opens her arms to, her child.

I don't sense the docile responsiveness of the annunciation here, "Let it be to me according to thy word….". In these drawings, Da Vinci has depicted a mother already bonded with her child. In each picture her eyes are on him, her body inclined towards him, her hands ready to hold, touch, defend him. It is an important balancing truth that just as the Word became flesh, and was fully human, so was Mary, with the full range of emotional strength and protectiveness and self-offering that is the deepest expression of human love.

It's one of the obvious but not often mentioned observations that in depictions of the Nativity, women are under represented. Yet the Word became flesh, that miracle of divine love embodied in human personality, was possible because of the risky, scary, relentless love of his mother. These experiments in ink are amongst the best images that insinuate such constancy, courage and natural humanity through the body language of a mother whose child, has become the centre of her universe. And that too is theological paradox – the centre of the universe, reduced to infancy, and protected by the all attentive love of a mother. So this too is the mystery of advent, the fragility of infancy surrounded by the resilient yes of a mother, open-eyed love to the reality of her child. 

In spirituality as in much else I guess we all have our conceptual and devotional comfort zones. As in most other areas of life, a comfort zone is a good place to be, for a wee while. But living there long term does little to set free our imagination, stimulate intellectual curiosity, develop emotional stamina, sustain mental and physical health, or change much else about us so that we might want to be more than we presently are content with being.

Being a man, may be a biological accident, but it's also an inevitable part of my human identity, a partial and incomplete way of looking at the world, and therefore a limitation of horizon and persepctive that I need to allow for – being a man, I can only guess at what it was like to be a young woman, visited by an angel, who announces my future, and links it to the future of the whole creation. The Annunciation is one of the most stunning moments in the history of human religious experience, an event with comic and cosmic significance; comic, because it begins a drama that will resolve in an unimaginable triumph of love, life and goodness; and cosmic because the drama is the drama of the world's salvation and the redemption of all Creation. The great artists of the Renaissance saw this with instant clarity and portrayed it with magnificent anachronism, extravagant symbol, and theological sensitivity.

Now as a 21st Century man, I encounter such art and realise I'm out of my depth, summoned by a beauty beyond me, addressed by strangeness, compelled to read but uncertain of the language, and therefore needing a grammar of aesthetics and a dictionary of medieval religious concepts and affections, to help me unlock the syntax of images that say more than words. So a painting of the Annunciation like that of Vittore Carpaccio above, invites me to be perplexed, impatient, and conceptually disempowered – that is, it beckons me across the thresholds of my comfort zone. And only if I have the courage to go, will I discover through contemplative patience, and through intellectual welcome of new and different ways of knowing, yet one other way of theological encounter, spiritual openness and personal surrender – which is prayer and a deepening love of God.

And let's face it. Devotion to the Triune God whose life of eternal self-giving is ever interwoven in mutual love, and is inexhaustibly expressed in infinite goodness, and overflows in endlessly creative purposes, reaching out to embrace the Creation called into being by that same self-expending love, requires of us more than the complacency, contentment and constraints of our personal devotional comfort zones.

And so to Carpaccio's painting, and Advent. Because whatever else Advent does, it forces upon us a reconceptualising of what God is about, and what our lives are about. The Annunciation is an event that changes forever and a day, the life of a young woman. Theologically, it reasserts the limitless paramaters of grace, it redefines the nature of redeeming love, it reconfigures the hopes of a nation, a world and all humanity, all of which hangs on the yes of a young woman. That is what the painting is about. Look at it in that light – that crisis moment that awaits the words, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word".  

C S Lewis again:

"The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned."

Letters to Malcom, ch. 13.