Hello readers!

For those of you who have been reading this site for at least a week, you’ll notice that the website’s layout is completely different than it was a week ago. My husband and I (but mostly him!) spent much of the weekend getting this new chocolatey, Baroque-y template functional and aesthetic for your reading pleasure. The image at the top of the page is a detail from Caravaggio’s (of course) The Raising of Lazarus from 1609. There is also search bar at the top of the page, and the sidebar contains links to pages on the site, what I’m currently reading, and archives. I think the color scheme adds an undefinable quality of something to images contained within posts, and I also enjoy the frilly little frames on the side bar. One thing we fixed over the weekend that wasn’t previously functioning correctly is that if you click on images contained within a post, they will now open up to full size on the screen. Huzzah! If you notice any bugs or have any suggestions, let me know.

Caravaggio, The Raising of Lazarus, 1609

In addition to layout change, I added the following new or modified pages to the site:

• A new page for those of you just getting started on the site.
• A revised page about the purpose of and story behind the site.
• A revised “About the Author” page
• FAQs
• The Entry Bibliographies page is up to date.

Enjoy!

Tags: Updates, Website

William Pannapacker wants to destroy higher education in the humanities.

Yesterday, I was reading CAA’s year in review newsletter and was drawn to the title of Pannapacker’s July 27 article, Over Educated, Underemployed: How to fix higher education. Pannapacker received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1999 and is now an Associate Professor at Hope College. Given that he is an academic, I wasn’t sure what to expect upon reading the article. But I can tell you that I wasn’t expecting to be absolutely infuriated. Pannapacker seems to forget that he was, at one time, a graduate student. He singlehandedly manages to insult prospective and current graduate students everywhere.

The article begins by Pannapacker agreeing with journalist and writer Anya Kamenetz “that graduate students are ‘really smart suckers.” Already off to such a pleasant start, Pannapacker continues by stating his view on higher education in the humanities: “higher education in the humanities exists mainly to provide cheap, inexperienced teachers for undergraduates so that a shrinking percentage of tenured faculty members can meet an ever-escalating demand for specialized research.” He proceeds to tell us that he cannot recommend graduate study in the humanities unless prospective students are independently wealthy, have an extensive network, or are considering graduate school to advance up one’s current career ladder. His first suggestion for improving graduate school in the humanities is that there should be an organization that focuses on assisting and preparing graduate students for the working world. His article thus far didn’t provoke me into a rage, but everything after this point did.

Pannapacker’s second helpful hint for improving graduate studies is – and I quote this verbatim because it was shocking – Expose who’s really teaching undergraduates.

“Reliable, up-to-date information should be available about the employment practices of individual universities. Prospective undergraduates and their parents should be able to choose institutions on the basis of who is actually doing the teaching: tenured faculty with a long-term relationship to the institution and the protections of academic freedom (necessary for honest grading), or an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations). This information should have an impact on institutional rankings and the standing of graduates. Eventually, that might begin to reverse the trend toward gutting undergraduate teaching (now about 80 percent off the tenure track). If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.”

Let’s start with the first ridiculous claim, who is “really” teaching our undergraduates: “an army of transient, ill-paid, hired-at-the-last-minute adjuncts and graduate students without terminal degrees who are retained primarily on the basis of high evaluation scores from students (traded for high grades and low expectations).” Honestly? Dear Mr. Pannapacker, if graduate students aren’t teaching while in graduate school under the guidance of their more experienced professors, how else are they supposed to learn to teach? And in such a specialized manner? What graduate program would even think of letting its students graduate without teaching experience? How can you assume that TAs would happily and shadily give out high grades in exchange for or in hopes of high evaluations, and that they have low expectations? If any of my TAs at UCLA had low expectations for their students, I would not have done half as well in my “actual” (actual being work done for the high and mighty professor) coursework. My TAs would have been doing me, and themselves, a disservice by not having such high expectations. I would be disappointed because I wouldn’t be challenged enough in my education, and TAs would be disappointed because their teaching skills wouldn’t improve by clinging to the training wheels that are low expectations. One of the main reasons students enter graduate study is to learn how to become a teacher of that field and how to balance research with teaching.

The final claim in this paragraph simply made me feel sad after I read it. “If parents come to know how their children are being shortchanged—at such great expense—they might support reforms aimed at reallocating resources toward teaching.” Shortchanged? Why would graduate students be graduate students if they were not extremely knowledgable about their field? The word shortchanged assumes all of the above – that TAs have low expectations of their students and are lazy enough to not bother to try to push their students to excel. Graduate students more than anyone know the value of their field, and they can disseminate that knowledge on a more digestible level than professors often can. Parents should be grateful that their students have an “army” of graduate students whose purpose (aside from research) is to teach, share their knowledge, and along the way, to make their field more relatable and easily understandable to anyone who might be struggling with the coursework or the attending professor’s teaching.

Pannapacker’s next suggestion is to Tell the truth about graduate school. He argues that many faculty members see themselves as heroes who have “‘saved’ a student from entering business.” But faculty members, Pannapacker says, are also academic parents of sorts. They

Pannapacker’s grammar makes it difficult for me to understand if the people who have “little to no experience” in the real world are the faculty or the students (sorry, children) or both – but either way, it’s unfair of Pannapacker to assume this for either party. Professors aren’t ignorant to the goings on of the real world, regardless if they’ve ever worked in corporate America. Students are getting more experience working “outside of higher education” with each year that budgets are slashed and they are forced to enter the working world. I personally have been out of school for a year and a half, and it is not something that I relish. Some days, my brain cells feel as though they’re turning to mush. Pannapacker, this is not what you want for the smart and able graduate students of America! American is already full of enough people outside of higher education and the next generation is getting stupider as K-12 education in America slowly dies. This is not the time to be preaching that students should not become graduate students and should instead abandon academia for the drudgery of the real world, leaving their knowledge to waste in the dark gutters of their minds.

And how about the nice pat on the back for those graduate students who are lucky to be such. Pannapacker doesn’t think getting accepted into a graduate program is something to be proud of – but don’t worry, your professors do! And they’re wrong to do so. Faculty foolishly ”regard a graduate-school placement as an accomplishment…” It doesn’t matter that you’ve slaved away on your senior or Master’s thesis and produced the foundations of what likely signifies you as a promising scholar. It doesn’t matter that you paid hundreds of dollars in application fees and spent weeks hunting down, researching, and talking to prospective advisors. You wasted your money visiting schools. And when your acceptance letter came, with whatever degree of funding offered to you, you should’ve shrugged it off. Got into Harvard? Full ride? No big deal. They’re just letting “inexperienced” and “really smart suckers” in, and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on them. (Yes, I’m using Harvard because it’s Pannapacker’s alma mater.) Bah humbug, I say! If you got into graduate school, no matter if you attend an Ivy League or a small state school, congratulations! And to those of you hoping for a nice crisp envelope filled with good wishes in your mailbox in the next couple months, I hope you get it.

Pannapacker argues repeatedly for free information, and I have nothing against making information, especially statistics about job placement, readily available to prospective and current students. This brings us to Pannapacker’s fourth and fifths points: Disrupt the graduate-school labor scheme and Train students for real careers. The fourth point of this article doesn’t appear to represent any real threat to morale in the same way the previous sections have. However, it is erroneous. I have spoken to professors from Ivy Leagues, small schools, and public but privately funded schools across the nation over the past year and a half, and not one of them let me off the phone without telling me about their department’s success or difficulties with job placement, whether I asked or not.

Pannapacker’s fifth point is more problematic. In one of the longest run-on sentences ever, he writes:

“Graduate programs must stop stigmatizing everything besides tenure-track positions at research universities that almost no one will get. They should cultivate an “alternative academic” sensibility by redesigning graduate school as professional training, including internships and networking opportunities, and working with other departments and programs, including partnerships with other institutions, granting agencies, government, and business to cultivate humanists who are prepared for hybrid careers in technology (“the digital humanities”), research, consulting, fundraising, publishing, and ethical leadership. … The largest challenge [facing these reforms] is the misguided investment of most tenured faculty members in the current system combined with the passivity of most graduate students and adjuncts, aggravated by the fear of unemployment that is now a permanent characteristic of academic life.”

In the four years of research I’ve done about graduate school and various programs,  I’ve never had the sense that graduate school as a whole was just going to train me for a life in academia. I realized that in a way, graduate school is what you make of it. It was obvious to me that if I wanted to gear my studies more toward curating, I knew I’d need to have internships in museums or galleries and coursework in conservation and museum studies before I’d be truly prepared for a curatorial position. If I wanted to simply be a professor, graduate school was already going to prepare me for that through teaching assistantships. It’s difficult for me to think of a single person I’ve talked to considering graduate school in the humanities who wants to use their humanities degree in the corporate world. This isn’t because they aren’t aware of their options. It is because an advanced degree in the humanities signifies something deeper than just wanting to build a career in the corporate world. It means that the person getting the degree has decided to devote a significant portion of their life to the detailed study of whatever field they’re in, and that they hope to continue that curiosity once they obtain their degree. Certainly there is nothing wrong with using one’s degree in any of the areas Pannapacker mentioned; I just think there is a disconnect between his idea that current graduate programs stigmatize “alternative” career options.

I’ve spoken to a lot of professors over the years, and I had one professor tell me that one of his active goals is to check his graduate students’ C.V.s after each semester. They discuss how professor and student could work together to make the C.V. as attractive as possible, be it through publication of a recent paper or co-authoring an article together. He also told me he actively seeks out internships and other opportunities for his students and has had incredible success placing them in jobs after they graduate because of the personal attention he gives his students. He’s assisted in placing his students happily in traditional teaching positions, conservation, curatorial work, non-profit work, and even, if memory serves me, government work.What a teacher! After that conversation, this professor became one of my academic heroes. He represents a unique case in the professors I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to – but only because he went so in depth with me about his concerns and efforts. Another professor was candid with me and told me that their department had tough luck placing students in recent years, and that I should take that into consideration. In my experience, professors do absolutely care about the placement of their students, wish for their success, and strive to assist their students in discovering what the best career option is for them.

Finally, we arrive at Pannapacker’s sixth point, which is equally disturbing as the second: Just walk away.

Pannapacker’s article ignited such debate in the comments section on Slate that Slate published a followup article with responses from current graduate students. What do you think of Pannapacker’s ideas to improve graduate school in the humanities?

Tags: Academia, Essay, Grad school, Higher Education, Humanities, News, Opinion

I have a confession: over the weekend, I bought a Kindle … and I love it! I have long held the belief that e-readers and e-books will be the death of literacy or at the very least, the death of the art and beauty of the printed word. To some effect, I still maintain this belief for the wider world. Illiteracy is on the rise in America, and its condition will worsen as both K-12 and higher education budgets are slashed and red flags remain waving. Illiteracy certainly won’t be helped by one of the nation’s most popular bookstores, Borders, shutting its doors last year.

The choice to buy a Kindle was not an easy one for me, but it was an obvious one. My wrestling first began on Christmas morning. My parents are very techie. They have all kinds of gizmos and gadgets, but I was nonetheless perplexed when my mother unwrapped a shiny, new Kindle Fire from my father (who owns what I see as its competitor, the iPad). I was surprised because although my parents are techies, they are also avid book lovers. Sitting in the living room on Christmas, we were surrounded by hundreds of books, with hundreds more still throughout their home’s bedrooms.

I grew up with a love for books, something instilled in me by both my parents. When my father was a young man, he would place beautiful labels in his books that stated that said book belonged to (a blank space where my father carefully signed his name). My mother was a theology graduate student, so you can imagine how many books she had in her personal collection – and books of such rich and complex content. As a child, I had my fair share of books as well (all of which my family has faithfully kept in storage), and my more recent collegiate-age collections are collecting dust in my old bedroom, as my new married home couldn’t spatially support so many volumes. It was a terrible thing to decide which books to part with when I married. I am an academic, and like my mother, I buy books with the intent of using them for life. The natural choices for me were any books pertaining to the 17th century - any part of it, geographically or otherwise. Books that also made the journey to their new home were my art history books about theory, any and all Italian and Spanish art related books, my Harry Potter hardcovers, and, of course, my Caravaggio book collection. These are books that I would never want to own or read in digital format. My copy of Caravaggio’s Secrets by Dutoit & Bersani has both dried teardrops of frustration and epiphany, hurriedly scribbled notes, bent page corners, and floppy pages from the time I threw the book on the floor in a 2 AM fury when nothing the authors were saying made any sense. I later picked the book up and held it lovingly, feeling as if I had kicked a puppy. My books are precious to me.

Kindle Fire

When my mother passed around her Kindle Fire for us to examine, the first thing I noticed was how similar it was to the iPad. It has a graphic-intense touch interface and also has a library where the reader clicks on the cover of a book to read it. It opens up, and swipe or touch is used to turn the page. The Kindle Fire also has app capability, including the ability to play games. I had little interest in my mom’s Kindle at the time, apart from thinking that it was a nifty gadget and she would enjoy it. My iPhone (or, just another backlit screen to make my eyes slowly die) was enough for me, I thought. But, as my husband and I were going to leave, I had a revelation of sorts. I looked around and was met square in the face, anywhere I looked, with full bookshelves. I realized that if my parents or I ever move (and we will), we will share a similar problem: having to decide which books in our large collections to keep, boxing up those chosen books, finding strong men to carry those boxes, moving, and rebuilding and restocking our bookshelves. My bookshelves at home are full to the brim, and I hesitate to ask for books – especially art history books (which I enjoy receiving as gifts) – because my home simply don’t have room for them. I will be in more trouble if we move into a smaller apartment (ours is extremely, unusually, and luckilylarge). All these rapid-fire thoughts about books and space and weight led to a conclusion that I wasn’t too comfortable with initially, but knew that I had to embrace: I needed to invest in an E-Reader, not to keep up with the times, but to simply save space (and, as I’ve happily discovered in the past couple days, on book costs).

The pros of an E-Reader are obvious: they can support an enormous amount of books, they’re light and portable, and they’re relatively inexpensive. The cons were more unnerving: to me, E-Readers are a sign that the physical printed word, which I love so much, is most likely slowly dying. I can’t have nearly the same emotional and intellectual investment – indeed, interaction – with my Kindle books as I can with my physical books. I can’t cry onto my E-Reader and later, look back at that tear stain and fondly remember the moment of revelation or sadness that the text brought me. I can’t throw my Kindle down in frustration when I don’t understand part of my course readings. The other question that nagged at me as I was researching, was what if the E-Reader company went out of business – where would I buy my E-Books? Indeed, after reading this article in today’s Wall Street Journal, I realized that such a concern wasn’t silly at all and that I made the safe choice choosing Amazon. The biggest con was that some of my favorite art history scholars and publishers don’t offer books in digital format. After all, one of the major purposes of having an E-Reader was to save space by having art historical and other academic texts in my new small device.

B&N Nook Simple Touch

My New Years Resolution is to read more, so Monday seemed like an obvious choice to begin exploring this uncharted territory. I researched diligently for most of the day on Monday and found out some surprising information that I hope will be helpful. I initially had my heart set on the B&N Nook. I watched a 45-minute demonstration of the Nook one day in Barnes & Noble about a year ago, and I was impressed by the technology but sickened by the concept, so I ignored it. A year later, the Nook still struck a chord with me as the most elegant, stylish, ergonomically-friendly E-Reader. Sure enough, most reviews agreed with that. I’d physically held and tested the Nook so I knew more or less what to expect after I ordered it, but I had no idea what the Kindle looked like or felt like in person and that was a large part of why I was ambivalent toward buying it. I was further put off by the Kindle because ads drive me nuts (if I can help it, you’ll never see ads on Caravaggista!) and it’s a whopping $40 to “unsubscribe” from the ads, which appear on the Kindle’s screensaver and at the bottom of the home screen. I was more partial to the Nook’s visual arrangement of the library and the fonts it uses. The Nook’s reading font customization options are wonderful and numerous. In contrast, the Kindle Touch, while a step up for Amazon, didn’t seem to put much effort into taking advantage of the touch interface by creating a visual library or playing with fonts on its home screen or reading screen. It would turn out that all these features that I was debating were fraught over for nothing.

Kindle Touch

I played tug-of-war with the Nook and Kindle until I did a quick price comparison for their art history books. Amazon offers more specialized art history books for Kindle. B&N also maintains an impressive collection of art history books. However, when I compared prices between these two sellers, my jaw hit the floor. For the types of books I want, B&N is twice – sometimes three times – more expensive than Amazon. To give an example, James Elkins’ Pictures & Tears is listed at about $40 for the Nook, and $16 for the Kindle! I wondered what James Elkins himself would think of the price difference – he, who happily has his work online for academics and intellectuals to read or sample at no cost. For all its elegant display and fancy cases, the Nook lost my puppy love in an instant when I saw that its prices were so high.

Having been thinking about the Kindle all day, I wanted it in the palm of my hands immediately. I had read that it was available in some stores, but I didn’t know what stores. I planned on sucking it up and waiting two days for it to come in the mail … until my husband and I realized that Kindles are sold at Target. We drove to a Target not far from us, and I was excited because their website said the Kindle Touch was in stock. I’m sure you’ve guessed it – it wasn’t. We drove miles up the street to another Target and by this time, since we had impulsively put our dinner on hold so I could feed my new obsession, we were hungry and tired from chasing this wild goose. We (or rather, I) half-walked, half-ran to the electronics section to get a Kindle of my very own, and they had it, and we bought it, and … it was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The books are so cheap and physically non-existant that I don’t feel guilty buying them (I’ve just bought a novel so far, but downloaded a variety of free books).

I’ve decided that although I have concerns about what E-Readers mean for the wider general future of literacy, my Kindle isn’t indicative of a slow literacy death in me. My Kindle is terrible for reading PDFs of academic journals and books with extensive footnotes. It doesn’t offer (and I wouldn’t want) certain must-have books in digital format, such as works by Philip Sohm and David M. Stone. And because of this, challenging my mind through what I read in itself becomes more of a challenge, more of something to look forward to. I can hope that one day, academic publishers will do a good job of publishing their books simultaneously in print and digital format, allowing academics and students to read, highlight, and mark up those books, footnotes, and academic journals with ease. Until then, I am content to have a love of physical books for all their beauty, the way they feel in my hand, and the way I can interact with them, and a separate love for the smallness and ease of my new device.

How do you feel about E-Readers?

Tags: Academia, B&N, Bookstore, Borders, E-Book, E-Reader, ereader, Kindle, Literacy, Nook, Reading

Raphael, The Marriage of the Virgin, 1504.

The Nativity of Jesus is drawn from accounts of Christ’s birth in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Following the Annunciation, Mary tells Joseph that she is with child and goes to visit her relative, Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. Just as the Annunciation tested Mary’s faith and character, so did her revealing of her pregnancy to Joseph. Mary’s divine pregnancy put Joseph in a very tough spot socially and culturally, and the proper thing to do to save face would be to call off the engagement. According to the Gospel of Luke, the couple travelled to Bethlehem to participate in the Roman census. It is here that Jesus is born in a stable because the inns in town had no vacancy, and it is here that he was wrapped in swaddling cloth and laid in a manger. According to Matthew, while in Bethlehem, an angel appeared to Joseph and told him to go through with his marriage to Mary. He also warns Joseph of the jealous King Herod, who wants to kill Jesus and plans to achieve this (since he doesn’t know which baby in his kingdom is the new King of the Jews) by  killing all baby boys. The angel tells Joseph to flee into Egypt and stay there until it is safe to return to home, once Herod has died.

Art history and modern tradition tend to mix up  or combine the accounts of the Nativity as they’re told in the Gospels. Luke doesn’t mention the Massacre of the Innocents or the flight into Egypt. Instead, according to Luke, Mary and Joseph are visited by shepherds in the stable, who admire the newborn king. Mary and Joseph eventually return home to Nazareth, but not before taking the eight-day-old Jesus to the Temple to be circumcised and blessed.  It is in Matthew that we find Joseph’s dreams, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Adoration of the Magi (which includes a clever plot by Herod, who sent the Magi to be spies), the Flight into Egypt, and the return home to Nazareth, in Galilee. Many of the stories in each of these Gospels are extremely popular in art history, and still much iconography is drawn from legends and apocryphal gospels.

Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, 1611.

Artists have presented the stories found in Luke and Matthew, especially the Adorations of the Magi and Shepherds, in many different ways. For this reason, I’ve included a gallery at the end of this post so you can see the vast array of differing modes of representation. I want to focus on a couple paintings from each motif. Feel free to read the Nativity story for yourself in Luke and Matthew, and then take a look at the gallery of images below and think about how artists’ representations differ or are similar to the actual text behind these themes!

Fra Angelico & Fra Filipo Lippi, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1440-1460

In  mid-fifteenth century Florence, Fra Angelico and Fra Filipo Lippi collaborated on The Adoration of the Magi. The National Gallery has a truly wonderful description and explanation of this artwork, and I encourage you to give it a  read. The painting

The entire painting, rich with Renaissance symbolism, can be seen as an analogy of the glory of the newfound Christ and the restoration of the world through Him. Indeed, the importance of the Nativity was not lost on Catholicism. The Tridentine Catechism cautions believers:

El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1612-14.

El Greco’s 1612-14 painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds presents a much more simplistic representation of the wonder of the newborn king. That is, it lacks the complex symbols found in Fra Angelo and Filipo Lippi’s painting. True to form, El Greco separates the heavenly and earthly realm but highlights the divine nature of Jesus through an impressive burst of light. Mary sits in quiet, still adoration as the shepherds physically react to the holy baby, their bodies twisting and hands raised in excite movement. The angels join in the celebration. In this way, the heavens and the earth are combined; joined by their mutual adoration of the Christ child.

Annibale Carracci, The Flight to Egypt, 1603

My favorite depiction of the Flight into Egypt (including the motif of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt) is Annibale Carracci’s 1603 painting. Carracci was Caravaggio’s arch-enemy, but I can’t help but love this painting. Mary tenderly holds onto her newborn child and Joseph follows. She stops and looks back at him. The painting is a picturesque landscape, invoking a sense of calm, and placing the Holy Family front and center. Mary and Joseph are calm despite fleeing danger, perhaps because they know that they are obeying the directive from heaven.

Murillo, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, 1665

In Murillo’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Joseph, in contrast to Carracci’s depiction, is a young(er) man. As I said in Baroque Spain: Devotion on Canvas, “[e]arly Spain was very devoted to Joseph, and glorified him as the embodiment of the perfect father.” Typical of Murillo’s work and in line with Spanish ideology, the Holy Family are a humbly depicted. By doing so, “Murillo made … Mary and Joseph’s perfection, obtained by and through God, accessible to any normal Baroque Spanish parent who might so desire to be a better pious parent.” The infant Jesus is peacefully sleeping and small putti appear, joining in the adoration as the baby rests.

Fra Filipo Lippi, Adoration in the Forest, 1459

Images of the Nativity were meant to begin a train of thought in the viewer as to Christ’s faithfulness to leave his heavenly home and come to earth as a lowly human. Hebrews, the Tridentine Catechism (discussed above), and St. Ignatius all remind the pious to remember Christ’s lowly birth and its significance to the faith. In Hebrews 2:1-10, the author gently reminds to be diligent in remembering the cornerstones of their faith:

Therefore ought we more diligently to observe the things which we have heard, lest perhaps we should let them slip. For if the word, spoken by angels, became steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward: How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? which having begun to be declared by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard him. God also bearing them witness by signs, and wonders, and divers miracles, and distributions of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will. For God hath not subjected unto angels the world to come, whereof we speak.

But one in a certain place hath testified, saying: What is man, that thou art mindful of him: or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels: thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast subjected all things under his feet. For in that he hath subjected all things to him, he left nothing not subject to him. But now we see not as yet all things subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour: that, through the grace of God, he might taste death for all. For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, who had brought many children into glory,  of their salvation, by his passion.

Rubens, Adoration of the Magi, 1617-18

Centuries later, St. Ignatius wrote instructions for the faithful to contemplate the Nativity. The contemplations’ goal is to

As you can see, humbleness is a key theme surrounding the ideology of the Nativity. The pious are called to humble themselves as Christ humbled himself; to serve as he served; and, perhaps most importantly, through art — to stand in awe of His miraculous birth and life as the Shepherds and Magi did centuries before. Art is a tool of wonder. It serves an emotional and didactic purpose: to present the faithful with the Nativity motif in such a way that it is memorial, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring.

Tags: Art History, Baroque Art, Caravaggio, Catholic, Catholicism, Christmas, El Greco, History, Iconography, Jesus, Nativity, Renaissance Art, Sacred Art, Series

Hello readers! Merry Christmas! In the coming days before Christmas, we’re going to examine the Christmas story, starting with the Annunciation. This is an important event in Catholicism and one of the most popular iconographies in Marian art. Before we start looking at the rest of the Christmas story as portrayed in art history, we should understand this profound event.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini, 1849-50.

The Annunciation is the moment when the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary and told her that she was going to have a son who would be the world’s Savior. The full story can be found in Luke 1.

Mary was in her home, going about her daily tasks, when she was suddenly greeted by an angel! This is rather startling and bound to provoke fear and awe: after all, it’s first century Palestine and Mary is alone in her home with a celestial, male, angelic being with what I guess is a booming voice. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti captured the sense of anxiety and awkwardness surrounding this scene. (Read more about the anxiety of the story and Rossetti’s painting at Smarthistory.) Most artists, however, and especially devout ones in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, treat the Annunciation more solemnly as a holy event that invokes wonder. Gabriel tells Mary that God is with her and she is to have a son. Mary is engaged to Joseph and a virgin and so she questions what Gabriel means. Surely she and Joseph weren’t going to conceive a child before marriage. No, says Gabriel: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy-the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35) This is a profound and marvelous statement – Mary’s divinely born son would not just be any ordinary baby, but the Son of God. Mary understood and accepted what Gabriel relayed to her instantly, telling the angel to “let it be to [her] according to [Gabriel's] word.” (Luke 1:38)

This event is the start of Mary’s blessedness in Catholic belief. For it is here that Mary believed the angel Gabriel. The Tridentine Catechism parallels Mary’s obedience with Eve’s disobedience and relates Mary’s importance in the faith:

The Church also recognized that this divine Annunciation could be hard for parishioners to accept or understand – and precisely, they write, because this is a divine event.

The Annunciation warrants pages of exposition in the Tridentine Catechism. And it should, for it marks the beginning and foundation for the reverence due to Mary. To (ironically?) quote Martin Luther, Mary is:

You can see, to vastly understate, that Mary is a woman to be feared and respected – because of her initial choice of obedience and faith in God in the face of what could be a dangerous situation for a young, engaged, virgin woman. And she is immortalized in art history in a plethora of ways.

In most Renaissance Annunciations, Mary is shown in the most expensive or fashionable contemporary dress, often with a book, which is a sign of intelligence and propriety. She, innocently reading, is interrupted by an angel. Baroque depictions are unapologetically more theatrical and leave no part of the celestial experience of the event out. Baroque works invoke wonder, movement, curiosity, and awe. Renaissance Annunciations are often more subdued – but what they lack in stylistic drama they make up for in expensive production materials that physically allude to the Annunciation’s specialness.

Simone Martini, Annunciation (Altarpiece), 1333. See it up close here.

Simone Martini was an early Italian Renaissance artist painting at a time when perspective was just beginning to be understood and really experimented with. This is one of my favorite Annunciation scenes because of the sheer awkwardness of it. The Annunciation is a large scale altarpiece, one of the first of its kind that emphasizes a particular scene rather than the traditional Madonna & Child. Martini is caught between the stylized icon style of the Byzantine world which had been so popular for sacred art and between moving toward a new type of softer, more realistic representation. Hence, Mary’s awkward pose and all of the figures’ exaggerated but strangely rounded faces. Art historian Ann Van Dijk explains the importance of this altarpiece as a devotional tool:

“By the time Simone Martini painted this altarpiece … the words of Gabriel’s salutation were associated in the minds of viewers not only with the biblical events surrounding the birth of Christ but also with the prayer that had adopted them as its opening phrase, the Ave Maria. … [In the fourteenth century, the Prayer's recitation] formed part of the daily devotions of the religious and laity alike. … Thus, for viewers of Simone Martini’s Annunciation, … the inscription read as a familiar prayer to the Virgin. This fact is crucial to understanding the image’s devotional character, for when taken into account, the angel’s kneeling posture and the words emanating from his mouth become a model of devotional practice for viewers to emulate.”

Caravaggio, The Annunciation, c. 1608

Not all Annunciations were so obviously meant to be devotional pieces that the viewer was to emulate. Caravaggio’s 1608 Annunciation invokes tranquility and introspection into the life of the Virgin and her character in the face of such a weighty charge. Gabriel floats above Mary, who is bowed down in humbleness, as she listens to and accepts Gabriel’s words. Lilies just barely illuminated in the background symbolize Mary’s purity. Caravaggio brings the sacred into the secular world by using models straight off the street and by stripping away any excess or gaudy signs of holiness. As Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times wrote, Caravaggio’s canvasses are

The genius of this canvas, and indeed Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre, is that he makes the divine accessible. Mary is, in a way, just like us – or just like we ought to be. Humble, realistic, trusting.

Peter Paul Rubens, Annunciation, c. 1610

Peter Paul Rubens’ 1610 and 1628 Annunciations are more dramatic. The golden heavenly light that is present in both works, shines down on Mary and suggests the presence of the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation. It also serves to remind the viewer of the divine and holy nature of this event. In both paintings, Mary is young and beautiful, dressed in the fine clothes of a Flemish noblewoman, and like a proper lady, she had been reading. In the 1628 painting, laundry sits in the corner near the table where Mary was reading her book. The paintings portray Gabriel and the relationship between him and Mary differently. In the 1610 piece, Gabriel is kneeling before Mary – perhaps a visual expression of her rank in Heaven. His gaze and posture, with his hand clasped onto Mary’s, lead the viewer to her. She holds her hand up to him, calm but surprised at his presence. In the 1628 work, Gabriel and the putti alike cast their gaze on Mary and Gabriel floats celestially above Mary as he announces the joyous news to Mary. Gabriel is in robes, and apart from his wings, these serve to separate him from the earthly realm. His body is strong and he appears confident, but he is not threatening; rather, the openness of his body toward Mary is meant to welcome. For Rubens, Mary is again meant to be a model to high society, pious Flemish women. She is the epitome of the pure, faithful, perfect woman. These paintings are meant to inspire viewers, especially, I think, female viewers, to lead holy lives and to remember the Virgin Mary and continue to honor her.

Peter Paul Rubens, Annunciation, 1628

Now that we’ve looked at the Annunciation, the next couple posts will discuss the other key events of the Christmas story and how they are portrayed and understood in art history.

In the meantime, check out this (rather small) gallery of various Annunciations, or head over to the Google Art Project to see Simone Martini’s Annunciation and Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation close up!

Tags: Annunciation, Art History, Baroque Art, Catholicism, Christmas Story, Martin Luther, Mary, Religious History, Renaissance Art, Series