The poetic beauty of the Song of Songs has resonated through the centuries and in different forms of faith—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—while influencing many forms of the arts, each period interpreting the rich imagery of the text in different ways. A traditional prayer, often sung, drawn partly from the Song of Songs and also from the Book of Judith, contains the lines: Tota pulchra es, Maria. Et macula originalis non est in Te, ‘You are all beautiful, Mary, and the original stain [of sin] is not in you’. The Song lends itself to many interpretations, but none can dispute its lyricism, its rich metaphors of containment, its meaning resolutely uncontained.

The Beloved’s purity in the Song becomes specifically attached to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation and after birth, a purity often symbolized in religious art as a clear vessel that contains liquid through which light may pass. Yet for many readers, the Song’s lyricism pertains equally to earthly love and desire. In just seven verselets in Song 4:1–7, we are invited to imagine the deep evening shadows of the Galaad hills, the soft white of freshly washed sheep, the blush of pomegranate seeds, tall towers, fawns amongst lilies, the heady perfume of myrrh. All these are symbols of faith, but equally a paean to the senses. Visual artists who interpret these texts can, in turn, invite their viewers to wander in both sensory and metaphorical landscapes.

Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation is rich with symbols: the freedom of the doves above the convent to fly unchecked, and to return to the dovecote at will, as opposed to the caged goldfinch, the red dash on its head believed to have occurred when it plucked a thorn from Christ’s brow before the crucifixion. The peacock symbolizes immortality represented in the resurrection in Christianity, but is also the attribute of Juno, Roman goddess of childbirth. Like the Song of Songs, Crivelli’s painting, if we will but ‘listen’, is rich with sound—the rush of wind, the rustle of trees, the murmur of voices, the chirping of birds.

Anatolian carpets refer to Italian trade with the East, their abstract patterns a reminder that not all faiths rely on figuration to represent meaning. Even the enclosed garden (its upper wall freshly mended), is echoed in the tied paper that functions as a stopper for the phial of water on the Virgin’s shelf, both symbolizing her closed perfection even after birth. And for everyday women in the Renaissance, the Virgin’s library suggests that knowledge is the key to understanding, rather than just the right of men.

Containment and liberation are also central to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto. The womb of the Virgin serves as a ‘mantle’ of the unborn Christ, the source of the world’s salvation, just as the tent in which Mary stands protects her in turn. So too the Chapel at the edge of the graveyard in Monterchi in which the painting stands is the site at which the people worship, the altarpiece signifying the belief in the resurrection of the faithful after death. Chapel, altarpiece, padiglione, the Virgin herself all incorporate ‘body as well as spirit, power as well as vulnerability, death, as well as life and rebirth’ (Ford 2004: 93–113).

The Virgin was given further valence in the Western tradition when the fourteenth-century charismatic preacher San Bernardino of Siena introduced an apocryphal element to Christ’s conception by stressing that the angels in heaven held their breath while they waited in hope that Mary would accept the responsibility of the Annunciation (Origo 1963: 75). It was hers to decide. Such an interpretation allows women a place in spiritual discourse denied them in texts that define Mary solely as the passive vessel in which Christ was conceived.

The infinitesimal space at the centre of Gretchen Albrecht’s Pacific Annunciation, where the two quadrants meet, is fraught with this moment—a pause, an expectation, a desire, an acceptance—when the movement held within the tracing and re-tracing of the artist’s hand as it arcs over the canvas reflects the oscillation of invitation, consideration, acquiescence between the messenger of God and the woman who will provide Christ with his humanity. We feel this movement; this distillation of narrative, so full of possibility. The poetic narrative or Word familiar in biblical text is translated into the gestural movement of paint across canvas, both specific and open to meaning, like the lyrical poetry of the Song of Solomon itself. Each ‘figure’ contained in its quadrant—balanced, equal—suggests a perfect harmony in which ‘there is no flaw’ (Song 4:7).

And as the title Pacific Annunciation suggests, further miracles can be looked for in the light of this one—in new and different spaces and new and different times.

References

Apa, Mariano. 1982. ‘La resurrezione, il parto e il sepolcro nell'opera di Piero della Francesca tra San Sepolcro e Monterchi’, Convegno internazionale sull'arte di Piero della Francesca, 1980 (Biblioteca comunale di Monterchi)

Ford, K. C. 2004. Portrait of Our Lady: Mary, Piero, and the Great Mother Archetype. Journal of Religion and Health, 43.2: 93–113

Herbermann, Charles G. (ed.) 1917. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1: Aachen–Assize (New York: Robert Appleton Company)

Origo, Iris. 1963. The Merchant of Prato (London: Penguin)