Pino Blasone

Hail Mary

Nazarene and Pre-Raphaelite Annunciations

Johann von Schraudolph, Die Verkündigung

Mariae

Annunciation and Visitation of the Other

German Nazarenes in the first, English Pre-Raphaelites in the second half of the 19th

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.

2

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Die

Verkündigung

That may be particularly true, as to few Annunciations painted or etched by Von

Schraudolph and Von Carolsfeld, where the so framed ground is a country landscape.

Instead the background of an Annunciation (and Visitation; Basel, Kunstmuseum; 1814)

drawn by Overbeck is the view of a village garden, with a biblical symbolic value. Anyway,

usually we do not attend a wild nature, rather a humanized and idyllic one. As in the setting

as in the attitude of the characters – mainly the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin annunciate

–, or between the former and the latter, we cannot perceive any apparent dramatic tension.

What is not so evident in Sulamith und Maria, indeed (Schweinfurt, Germany: Georg

Schäfer Museum). This diptych was painted in 1811 by Pforr. On the left wing we can

contemplate the Shulamite, a female Old Testament character. Her vitality contrasts with

some melancholy of Mary, portrayed on the right. Sitting in her chamber before a window,

she reads the Bible and plaits her hair with her hands. Most likely, there the announcing

angel is still to come. That is part of a series of pictures worked on by Pforr and by

Overbeck, where annunciation and visitation are complementary moments, in one explicit or

implicit symbolic way. So, a sense of expectance mitigates the loneliness of the maiden.

Such a pensive Madonna seems to be a fair image of the modern soul. Besides, it denotes an

attention to contemporary German philosophy, by Nazarene leading members at least.

3

Franz Pforr, Sulamith und Maria, detail

If the Shulamite is an exegetical prefiguration of Mary in the Song of Songs, the

Visitation is an episode next to the Annunciation, and referring to Mary and Elisabeth in

Luke’s Gospel. The latter meaning looks wider in a Nazarene view. It may concern the visit

by the angel to the Virgin too, as an immersion of the divine into the human. It regards some

revisiting the past and a future perspective, after the transition from the Old to the New

Testament. Last but not least, generally it implies a meeting with the Other, especially when

this one bears a different culture. In western Europe’s history, it might represent a

reconciliation between Protestant and Catholic traditions. No wonder, Overbeck depicted

Elisabeth and Mary as Italy and Germany allegories, probably influenced by Novalis’ essay

Christendom or Europe and by his “religion of love”. According to it, Johann G. Fichte’s

philosophic “Ego” and “Not-Ego” are more Christianly substituted with “I” and “Thou”.

If someone wants to recall the cultural clime, which made possible a kind of renewed

Marian worship, actually nothing better than reading some quotations from Novalis’

writings: “Madonna: each people or time has its favourite female character. […] The fine

4

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]

Dante G. Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla

Domini

Nostalgic and Literary Annunciations

5

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]

6

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,

7

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.

Rupert Ch. W. Bunny, Ancilla Domini

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

8

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).

John W. Waterhouse, Annunciation

Annunciation, Denunciation, Renunciation

Annunciations in a garden are not lacking. A nice example in the Pre-Raphaelite

manner is The Annunciation. “Hail, thou art highly favoured” by Beatrice Emma Parsons,

set in a field of lilies symbolizing Virgin’s pure soul (Provo, U.S.A.: Brigham Young

University Museum of Art; 1899). More traditional according to its times, La salutation

angélique by the French artist Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval is rather influenced by the

Nazarenes, so framed by an arch and closing up through different levels of view from the

foreground to the background, which is a deep country landscape (Paris: Musée d’Orsay;

1860). In both cases we deal with excellent oleographies, as well as for an Annunciation by

9

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.

James J. J. Tissot, Annonciation

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

10

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.

Henry O. Tanner, Annunciation

11

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.

12

Claughton Pellew, Annunciation

Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2008

[1] Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg “Novalis”, To the Virgin, translated by

Charles Wharton Stork in The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,

Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English vol. IV, edited by Kuno

Francke, 1914. In a later edition, the Fragments quoted here above are classified as 2017

and 2018. In Novalis’ philosophic view, the Lógos is never really disjoined from the

Mýthos, so that the Marian “myth” looks concomitant with the allegory of Sophia,

understood as divine wisdom. At the same time, the process of redemption should coincide

with progress and evolution, so as to involve mankind as well as generally nature.

[2] Dante G. Rossetti, For An Annunciation, Early German and For a Virgin and

Child, by Hans Memmelinck (originally titled For a “Virgin & Child” by Michael Angelo),

in The Poetical Works, 2 vols. edited by William Michael Rossetti, Boston: Little, Brown,

1913; vol. I. Cf. Sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, manuscript at the Tinker Library,

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Actually t is really curious,

13

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).

14