A story told a thousand times.

I have a fascination with early Renaissance religious art, which may be slightly ironic considering my disliking for organized religion in general. There’s something about the paintings themselves that resonate with me, something about them that absolutely leaves me amazed.

My current banner (which will change whenever my boredom decides to burrow itself underneath my skin) is a small bit from the Merode Altarpiece by the Master of Flemalle, also known as Robert Campin. It is one if the number of religious scenes that has been painted over and over by practically every painter that has lived some point in the world’s history. Or, at least up until about the mid-1700’s or so. Simone Martini, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Leonardo da Vinci, Philippe de Champaigne, El Greco, and John Collier are just a small handful of the infinite number of artists who have depicted the Annunciation at some point in their artistic careers.

The Annunciation is, in Christianity, the revelation to the Virgin Mary by the Archangel Gabriel that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God. Since the main, if not only, way for artists to make money during the Renaissance was to work for the Church, it is no surprise that almost every painter has his own version of this scene in the Bible. And if the painter does not have an Annunciation painting that we can identify, you can be sure that in some church somewhere he has a painting picturing the Madonna and Child, or maybe a cute crucifixion scene for everyone to enjoy.

While Madonna and Child paintings are nice and all, and crucifixion paintings are… endearing, there is something about Annunciation paintings that I truly love. Mostly, I think, it’s the mystery behind them. Every artist places a different emotion into Mary’s face, and in most paintings it doesn’t look as if the young woman is particularly happy to be hearing that she is to conceive without the touch of a man. She either looks depressed, terrified, or downright apathetic. I suppose that some of that can be attributed simply to the time period and the style of painting more than anything else, but it still makes you wonder. Well, it makes me wonder, anyway.

You would think that Mary would look a little more… surprised, don’t you? The paintings where Mary looks fearful are probably the most “believable” of all, if one were to contemplate the situation. I mean, if some weird guy with wings randomly came up to you and told you that you were going to conceive a baby without managing to have sex with a man, would that not weird you out just the slightest bit? And yet in some of these paintings it does not even look as if Mary is even really listening to Gabriel. She is simply lost in her own little world.

Then again, maybe the poor girl just went into shock. Seems reasonable enough considering.