Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Another Annunciation from Christian artist Nyoman Darsane of Bali, Indonesia. This batik Annunciation appears to be dated 1998.  

Learn more about the artist at https://indigenousjesus.blogspot.com/2010/05/featured-artist-nyoman-darsane.html

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

From Chartres Cathedral, by way of the University of Pittsburg (and Professor Emeritus M. Alison Stones) comes this tiny Annunciation in an initial D from an illuminated manuscript. Most of the manuscript Annunciations we have are from personal prayerbooks (the Book of Hours), but this one is from a Pontifical: basically the service book used by the celebrant for the sacraments and other rites. If I understood the write-up correctly, this image is from the page for the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25).

I'll give you the detail first, and then the whole picture in its context, so you can appreciate just how much artistry is involved.

Incipit from Chartres Cathedral Pontifical.
Dr M. Alison Stones

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Sad to say, I have been unable to find any specific information about this Annunciation. A Google image search yielded the dubiously helpful results of "Holy Place." 

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

This week's Annunciation is by Pere Serra (1404) and is in the Pinacoteca di Brera, an art gallery of Milan. According to the museum website: "This work is by a Spanish artist who worked in Catalonia in the latter half of the 14th century but was also active in Sardinia. It shows the Annunciation to Mary by the angel in a beautiful purple robe in a way that almost disappears after the Council of Trent (1545-63)... The pictorial space is cramped: the vase of lilies, probably alluding to the virginity of Mary, seems to spill out towards us."

A Marian antiphon often prayed at the end of Night Prayer, Alma Redemptoris Mater ends, "you who received Gabriel's joyful greeting, have pity on us poor sinners."

Here's my favorite musical version of that prayer, one I encountered in my first semester of college: