Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Here is a splendid 15th century Annunciation from a Florentine triptych by Bicci di Lorenzo, now in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (on permanent loan from the  Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection). Notice the seraphim (fiery angels) in the peaks above each image. 

The centrality of the Crucifixion reminds us of the centrality of the Cross in the "collect" of the Angelus prayer:

Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts, 
that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ thy Son was made known by the message of an angel may, by his Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of his Resurrection,
Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Triptych by Bicci di Lorenzo
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

This week's Annunciation is from a French Book of Hours, described by the website of the Huntington Digital Library in these terms:

Book of Hours, according to the use of Paris. Includes a calendar, pericopes of the Gospels, the Hours of the Virgin, Psalms, Hours of the Cross and of the Holy Spirit, the Office of the Dead and additional prayers. In Latin and French. ... Written in France in the middle of the fifteenth century. Written in a gothic book hand in 2 sizes. Twelve large illuminations in arched compartments with serrated tops, above 4 lines of script; the outer borders contain black ivy sprays with gold foliage, thin blue and gold acanthus leaves placed at the corners, various flowers and strawberries. The miniatures are: f. 28 (Hours of the Virgin), Annunciation; f. 40v (Lauds), Visitation; f. 53 (Prime), Nativity; f. 60 (Terce), Annunciation to the shepherds; f. 65 (Sext), Adoration of the Magi; f. 70 (None), Presentation in the temple; f. 75 (Vespers), Flight into Egypt; f. 83 (Compline), Coronation of the Virgin; f. 90 (Penitential psalms), David praying; f. 109 (Hours of the Cross), Crucifixion; f. 113 (Hours of the Holy Spirit), Pentecost; f. 117 (Office of the Dead), burial scene in a churchyard. Initials in 4 styles: 4- and 3-line initials (ff. 40v and 65) in gold- or white-brushed blue set on pink grounds, decorated with acanthus leaves picked out in gold; 4- and 3-line initials in white-patterned blue on gold grounds with colored trilobe leaves in the infilling; 3-line initials in white-patterned blue against gold-patterned red grounds with flowers set on the painted gold infillings; 2- and 1-line initials in gold on alternate pink grounds with blue infilling, or the reverse; ribbon line fillers in the same colors; initials within the text touched in yellow. Rubrics in a bright orange-red. Bracket borders in the same style of ivy sprays, gold motifs, acanthus and flowers, enclosing the text from the outer margin, occur on f. 13 (Gospel of John), f. 19 (Obsecro te), f. 23 (O Intemerata), f. 170v (the 15 Joys), and f. 177 (the 7 Requests). Band borders running the length of the text in the calendar and at the presence of 2-line initials; when applicable, they are traced from the recto to the verso. Bound by Capé in dark green morocco with red morocco doublures; gilt edges.

 

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

 

Pieter Lastman's 1618 Annunciation (with its playful cat eyeing Mary's yarn!) hints at his stay in Rome, where Caravaggio was in the height of his career (corresponding to some particular depths of his life). Great in his own artistic contributions, the Dutch Lastman is best known as the teacher of Rembrandt van Rijn.

The painting now resides in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Detail from the Golden Legend
Huntington Digital Library

Another manuscript of the Golden Legend gives us this week's Annunciation, in a book described by the Huntington Digital Library in great detail:

Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea written in France, perhaps in Paris, during the next to the last decade of the thirteenth century. Manuscript in England by the third or certainly the last quarter of the fourteenth century, to judge by the script of the note added on f. 11v, correcting the king's name from "Edmundus" to "Edwardus." .... Written by two scribes in a gothic book hand....  Written instructions to the illuminator are present for approximately one third of the miniatures; they tend to be more complex and closer to the text than the resulting miniature. Rudimentary sketches, or evidence of sketches, for the miniatures occur in about one quarter of the cases; a number of miniatures have both the written directions and the preliminary sketch. Other Decoration: Major initials, 9- to 7-line, in dull pink or blue, patterned in white against a cusped ground of the other color, infilling in a darker shade of the same color as the initial, with grotesque or leaf forms decorated with burnished gold, and marginal extensions. Initials, 4-line, to introduce the Etymologia of similar style; secondary initials, 2-line, alternating red and blue with flourishes of the other color. Line fillers in the shape of mice, the same as the decoration on the catchwords. Carefully corrected throughout by the scribe of the text, corrections in yellow boxes. Some marginalia in various hands up to 16th century. Input into Digital Scriptorium by: C. W. Dutschke, 8/2/2012. Cataloged from existing description: C. W. Dutschke with the assistance of R. H. Rouse et al., Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (San Marino, 1989). Bound in original[?] oak boards, quarter backed in modern mottled calf; remains of 2 fore edge straps of pink leather closing to pins on the center back; flyleaves, washed, contained a 15th century prose text in French in 2 columns, written in a Bâtarde script.

 See the whole page (in fact, peruse the manuscript!) on the site of the Huntington Digital Library!