Praying the Angelus with Art: An important message

As we close this year, this Flemish Annunciation with its delicate light offers us hope for the light of a new year. That is my prayer, too.

With this gentle image, my weekly Annunciation messages must come to an end. It has lasted ten years: something I never anticipated! But with the release of my book during this 350th anniversary of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary, I need to direct my activities toward the focus the Lord gave St. Margaret Mary: promoting the nine First Fridays in reparation for Eucharistic coldness, sacrilege, and neglect. Indeed, the more I reflect on it, the more convinced I am that Our Lord asked for this reparation 350 years ago in anticipation of our own time, when an overwhelming percentage of Catholics would neglect Sunday Mass, and receive "unworthy Communions," not out of malice, but out of sheer ignorance. 

I hope in the future to create a series of online videos, and perhaps a parish retreat, using all that I have learned from the many works of art I have shared with you through the years. When that happens, or if I find a new way to share the art of the Annunciation, I will let you know here and on various social media channels, whatever the times may offer.

Thank you for accompanying me week by week, and for praying (and promoting) the Angelus! God bless you!

Anonymous 15th Century Flemish Annunciation
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Is this Gothic Annunciation from Spain not both splendid and unique? Mary is inside, and yet the room is open to the outside. Her bedroom itself is in and also open to the garden (an enclosed garden, as we can tell by the surrounding walls in the background): Mary is herself the "garden enclosed" where God meets humanity in a wedding that will never end. I chose this image for the 4th Sunday of Advent for that reason.

I love the sharpness of the image: the walls are cleanly stuccoed, while the decoration of the floor tiles is not overdone, allowing the brocaded robes on Mary and Gavriel to really stand out.

Annunciation, Master of Xàtiva
Museu Nacional de Catalunya

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

Here's an unusual concept: An Annunciation depicted within a picture of a bed and curtain. (Notice the curtain rod at the top of the sheet; the entire background is the curtain on which the rose-bush and Annunciation are delicately placed. But the roses should not have thorns!)

Gaspar Homar (1870 – 1955) executed this in watercolor, pen and ink and graphite pencil on paper mounted on a colored cardboard, circa 1900-1905.

Bed and curtain with Annunciation, Gaspar Homar (circa 1900)
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

This image by Josep Bernat Flaugier (1757 – 1813) dates to 1800 and features, rather unusually, two putti looking on. 

Annunciation (Flaugier, 1800)
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Praying the Angelus with Art: This Week's Image

 My community has an exceptionally high firewall that does not permit me to access web pages in ... certain countries. So I had to copy and past the information about the painter of this modern Annunciation from a Facebook page honoring the matriarch of an Italian-American family eatery. I don't know where she got it. (Probably on the other side of the firewall.)

Anyway, I chose this image for today because the abundance of lilies seems to speak of this week's Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (the patronal feast of and a Holy Day of Obligation in the U.S.).

Ukrainian Theotokos by Alexander Igorevych Okhapkin, born in 1962 in Kirovograd . In 1982 he graduated from Dnipropetrovsk Art College , in 1990 - Kiev Art Institute (studio of Shatalin). He paints icons depicting Our Lady and Jesus in Ukrainian attire. In his works, the traditional techniques of ancient icon painting and modern execution are synthesized. Art critics call his work "religious poetry in paints."

Annunciation, Alexander Okhapkin