page_title: Annunciation (Memling)
section_title: Light
hierarchical_section_title: Annunciation (Memling) / Iconography / Light
context_page_description: The Annunciation is an oil painting on oak panel attributed to Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It depicts the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus, described in the Gospel of Luke. The painting was completed c. 1482 and was partially transferred to canvas in the 1920s; it is today held in the Robert Lehman collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
  The panel shows Mary in a domestic interior with two attendant angels. Gabriel is dressed in ecclesiastical robes, while a dove hovers above Mary, representing the Holy Spirit. It expands upon the Annunciation wing of Rogier van der Weyden's c. 1455 Saint Columba Altarpiece. According to art historian Maryan Ainsworth, the work is a "startlingly original image, rich in connotations for the viewer or worshiper".
  The iconography focuses on the Virgin's purity. Her swoon foreshadows the Crucifixion of Jesus, and the panel emphasizes her role as mother, bride, and Queen of Heaven.
context_section_description: From the 9th century Light became associated with Mary and the Incarnation. Millard Meiss notes that, from the 12th century a common way to convey the conception was to compare light passing through glass to the passage of the Holy Spirit through the body of the Virgin. St. Bernard likened it to sunshine explaining in this passage: "Just as the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window without damaging it, and pierces its solid form with imperceptible subtlety, neither hurting when entering nor destroying when emerging; thus the word of God, the splendor of the Father, entered the virgin chamber and then came forth from the closed womb."
  Three objects on the bedside cabinet represent the Virgin's purity: the water flask, the candleholder, and the ropewick light.  The light passing through the glass of the womb-shaped flask symbolizes her flesh, pierced by divine light, its clear and undisturbed water represents her purity at the moment of conception, a device found also in the earlier paintings as a metaphor of the Virgin's sanctity. The flask shows a reflection of the window's crossbar as a cross, a symbol of the Crucifixion, another small detail in which Memling "lays one translucent symbolic form upon another".
  Light represented by candles was then often used to symbolise the Virgin and Christ; both Campin and van Eyck placed hearths or candles in their annunciation scenes.  The candleholder without a candle and the ropewick without flame symbolize the world before Christ's Nativity and the presence of his divine light, according to Ainsworth.
  The challenge for painters of the Annunciation was how to visually represent the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, or Logos. They often showed rays of light emanating from Gabriel or a nearby window entering Mary's body to depict the concept of Christ "who inhabited and passed through her body". The light rays might sometimes include an inscription,  and were sometimes shown entering her ear, in the belief that it was thus the Word became flesh.
  Memling did not depict the light as distinct rays, nor had Dieric Bouts's Getty Annunciation. Yet the room is bright, filled with sunlight, a fenestra incarnationis, which would have been an adequate symbol for the contemporary viewer. By the mid-15th century the Virgin is found depicted in a room or chamber near an open window to permit the passage of light. Memling's room, with its window through which light streams, is a most "decorous sign of Mary's chastity", according to Blum. There are no word scrolls or banderoles to indicate the Virgin's acceptance, yet her consent is obvious through her pose, which seems, according to Sterling, both submissive and active.
caption: Dieric Bouts' Annunciation, c. 1450s, Getty Center, Los Angeles, omits rays of light.
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