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Gabriel and the Virgin: The Secret of the Annunciation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2016

Simon Altmann
Simon Altmann*
Affiliation:
Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AJ, UK. E-mail: simon.altmann@bnc.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

It has long been known that the vast majority of the Annunciation pictures show the Virgin on their right. All former studies, including one by the present author, treat this as a problem of left-right or mirror symmetry. This is not correct: this symmetry exchanges the right and left hands and such a transformation is not permitted: Gabriel, must always be represented as right-handed. That this is so emerged from the study of a database that we have created, which contains 1007 Annunciations from C3 to 1750. Details of this database, which the author intends to put in the public domain in due course, and of other results, will be left for a further paper. It is a sufficient example here that from C3 to 1400 Gabriel shows his right hand to the Virgin in 62 items out of 93, and the left hand in only two. Even from 1401 to 1750 the Angel shows his right hand to the Virgin 278 times and only 22 for the left. A brief pictorial study of the evolution of the Annunciation paintings from C3 onwards shows why the right-handedness of Gabriel made it easier for the painter to present him on the left. A summary table of the results obtained from the database is provided. This study offers some explanation of the fact pointed out in a former paper that sculptural representations of the Annunciation are often variant, with the Virgin on the left.

Type
Erasmus Lecture 2014
Information
European Review , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 149 - 158
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2016 

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References

References and Notes

1.See for instance D. Denny (1977) The Annunciation from the Right from Early Christian Times to the 16 Century (New York: Garland). Readers must not confuse the positioning on the right-hand side of the divine with its positioning on the right of a picture. Thus, in the Last Judgement the saved are on the right-hand side of the Lord but on the left of the picture. On page 36 of the book by J. Hall (2008) The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), the author dismisses the problem of the Annunciation with this short sentence: ‘Thus the angel, … and the light of the Holy Spirit, come from the Virgin’s right (our left) because this is the traditional location of all things Divine.’ This, I am afraid, is amply contradicted by scriptural evidence: Jesus received the Holy Spirit from his left. Thus Acts 2:33: ‘… being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father [that is, from his left] the promise of the Holy Ghost…’.Google Scholar
2.McManus, I. C. (2005) Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts. European Review, 13(Supp. 2), pp. 157–180.Google Scholar
3.The most famous sculpture of Hermes is Giambologna’s, from 1580 in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, which of course carries the caduceus on the left hand. There are dozens of copies of it, and of others inspired by it, some displayed in British gardens. The reader will easily find hundreds of photographs on the internet, but beware: some are inverted – which is disastrous in our case. A good example in painting appears in one of the three Raphael cartoons for the Vatican tapestries that are not inverted: The Sacrifice at Lystra, where a statue of Hermes appears in the background, with the caduceus correctly on the left arm. (The Vatican tapestry, of course, is inverted.)Google Scholar
4.Altmann, S. (2013) Right and left in art: the Annunciation. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 31(2), pp. 223–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5.Ordinal references to the Annunciation refer to their position in the database.Google Scholar