These quiet mauves and pinks look peculiarly modern fs the colors for a Renaissance fresco. Mary is a suitably pale and humble virgin in contrast to the archangel Gabriel' whose wings are a cascade of joyous color as befits the announcement he is to deliver. Fra Angelico created this particular Annunciation at the Convent of Saint Mark, Florence for a place of prayer and contemplation. In fact, the room in the image is the cell that it was intended to adorn.
A more secular age draws on the fund of powerful religious imagery, even as belief in the sources of the imagery weakens. An Italian painter of the Risorgimento, Silvestro Lega also lived in Florence when he painted The Visit in 1868. He intended the viewer to recognize the formality of the human figures, their placement on the canvas arranged like a church trpitych, as the template informing the artist's personal vision. His models were young sisters, Maria, Issolina, and Anna Snipers, who took piano lessons with Virginia Batelli (the onlooker - at right). For Lega the young Batelli was his artistic muse, and when she died an early death from tuberculosis in 1870, he fled Florence for Romagna. After ten years of hardship and loneliness, he returned to Florence and his circle of painter friends.
A devout Roman Catholic, the Frenchman Maurice Denis uses the muted palette of Fra Angelico's cell fresco for Encounter. Like Lega's women, his figures maintain a chaste individual space even as they embrace. This time the human onlooker is joined by two white birds, perhaps doves of peace. 
1. Fra Angelico (1395-1455) - Annunciation, c.1437-1444, Convent of San Marco, Florence.
2. Silvestro Lega (1826-1895) - The Visit, 1868, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome.
3. Maurice Denis (1870-1943) - Encounter, 1892, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
4. Maurice Denis - The Visitation, 1894, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
4 comments:
Jane,
As ever a most thought-provoking post from you. Looking at the pictures by Lega and Denis reminded me that The Visitation (of Mary to St Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist) was another subject often depicted by Renaissance artists. The setting of both Lega and Denis pictures in gardens also calls to mind the many depictions of the Virgin within a hortus conclusus (an enclosed garden symbolic of her virginal state).
Thanks for your comments. For me, this was a case of working backwards from the ceremonial look of the modern works. I suspect there's more to those two white birds than I understand.
Jane,
I suspect you're right about the birds, They're clearly white doves and doves are Christian symbols of peace, purity and love. They're also, of course, symbolic of the Holy Spirit, 3rd person of the Trinity. It was a dove that brought Noah an olive branch to the Ark to show that the Flood had receded - for Christians a pre-figuration of salvation. Denis was a devout Catholic and imbued with the symbolism attendant on Catholic theology and liturgy. I'm sure that the inclusion of the doves is more than a decorative element. Interestingly, with reference to The Visitation, there is a picture "Mary Visits Elizabeth" (1894)in The Hermitage, St Petersburg - again set in a garden, but in this instance no doves. As ever, the deeper one delves, the more there seems to be explored.
Thank you again, Andy. In the works from his Nabi phase (never entirely ended, to be sure)Denis seems so modern that it is easy to overlook the thoroughgoing nature of his religious faith. Denis was a tertiary in the Catholic church, a lay person who was allowed to wear a clerical collar on occasion. I wonder if "Encounter" has ever been shown with "Mary Visits Elizabeth"?
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