Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

In this beautiful page (granted, they are all beautiful) from the Spinola Hours by the Flemish illuminator known as the Master of James IV of Scotland, we see Heaven open in a kind of prequel as God the Father seems to entrust Gabriel (identifiable by the golden mantel with its lining) with the important message in the form of a staff. At the bottom of the page, angels attend a gate that leads to a staircase into Mary's house, where angels crowd around Gabriel, while golden words (they appear to be abbreviated) thread their way from Gabriel to Mary's halo.

This image is from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and is used under the Museum's Open Content program.

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Founded by Blessed James Alberione, the Casa Divin Maestro retreat house in Ariccia, Italy is where Pope Francis usually makes his annual Lenten retreat. Besides its majestic setting overlooking Lake Albano, the wooded area includes marble "stations" for the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. This Annunciation is at the very beginning of that "Way of the Rosary."

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

This week's Annunciation within an initial R is from a copy of page in an illuminated manuscript by Fra Angelico, from the Blessed's own friary in Florence. (To preserve the original, only this facsimile is on display in the Convento San Marco library.) The text reads: Rorate coeli desuper, et nubes plua[n]t iustu[m] aperiatur terra et germinet Salvatorem. Resp. alleluia, alleluia. (Drop down dew from above you heavens, and let the clouds rain the Just One; let the earth be opened and bud forth the Savior.)

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Another "nun's badge" (evidently these were an ordinary feature of sisterly devotion in the mid 19th-century), this Annunciation was executed in watercolor by Francisco Martínez in about 1750. For more information, visit ChristianIconography.info

Photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Richard Stracke,
shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.