The Annunciation and Art with Victoria Emily Jones

This week, I welcomed Victoria Emily Jones, the writer and creator of the website Art and Theology, to join me on Old Books With Grace. You can either watch the YouTube video of our discussion (right below this paragraph), or listen to it on the podcasting service of your choice. Below I’ve included the art and poetry that we discuss in this wonderful episode! I hope it encourages you in your preparations for Advent and imitating Mary in receiving the Christ child.

https://open.spotify.com/show/4W2Iaz9lP98gBIQQgGKM7J

Martin Schongauer, Altarpiece of the Dominicans (aka The Mystic Hunt), ca. 1480. Oil on pine, each panel 116 × 116 cm. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (main panel from an altarpiece), ca. 1426. Tempera on wood, 162.3 × 191.5 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

“Our Lady’s Salutation” by Robert Southwell (ca. 1561–1595) (spellings modernized) 

Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find,
The first began, the last reversed our harms;
An angel’s witching words did Eva blind,
And angel’s Ave disenchants the charms;
Death first by woman’s weakness entered in,
In woman’s virtue life doth now begin.

O virgin breast! the heavens to thee incline,
In thee their joy and sovereign they agnize;   [agnize = acknowledge]
Too mean their glory is to match with thine,
Whose chaste receipt God more than heaven did prize.
Hail, fairest heaven that heaven and earth doth bless,
Where virtue’s star, God’s sun of justice, is! 

With haughty mind to Godhead man aspired,
And was by pride from place of pleasure chased;
With loving mind our manhood God desired,
And us by love in greater pleasure placed:
Man laboring to ascend procured our fall,
God yielding to descend cut off our thrall.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859–1937), The Annunciation, 1898. Oil on canvas, 57 × 71 3/4 in. (144.8 × 181 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Jyoti Sahi (Indian, 1944–), Incarnation within the Anthill, 2019. Mixed media on canvas, 28 × 10 1/2 in. (71.1 × 26.7 cm). Victoria Jones has written more about this piece at https://artandtheology.org/2019/12/08/he-comes-comes-ever-comes/. 

“Annunciation” by Scott Cairns, from Idiot Psalms: New Poems (Paraclete Press, 2014)

Deep within the clay, and O my people
very deep within the wholly earthen 
compound of our kind arrives of one clear,
star-illumined evening a spark igniting 
once again the tinder of our lately
banked noetic fire. She burns but she
is not consumed. The dew lights gently,
suffusing the pure fleece. The wall comes down.
And—do you feel the pulse?—we all become
the kindled kindred of a king whose birth
thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.

---

The land lies open: summer fallow, hayfield, pasture. Folds of cloud mirror buttes knife-edged in shadow. One monk smears honey on his toast, another peels an orange.

A bell rings three times, as the Angelus begins, bringing to mind Gabriel and Mary. “She said yeah,” the Rolling Stones sing from a car on the interstate, “She said yeah.” And the bells pick it up, many bells now, saying it to Mechtild, the barn cat, pregnant again; to Ephrem’s bluebirds down the draw; to the grazing cattle and monks (virgins, some of them) eating silently before the sexy tongue of a hibiscus blossom at their refectory window. “She said yeah.” And then the angel left her.

Mysteries of the Incarnation: “She Said Yeah” by Kathleen Norris, from Little Girls in Church (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)

More resources on the Annunciation and art, suggested by Victoria Emily Jones:

• Victoria’s Pinterest board of Annunciation art
• artandtheology.org
• The Annunciation: A Pilgrim’s Quest by Mark Byford (Victoria’s review of the book)
• Divine Conception: The Art of the Annunciation by Sarah Drummond
• Annunciation: Sixteen Contemporary Poets Consider Mary ed. by Elizabeth Adams