Annunciation (Memling)

The painting was executed in the 1480s and was transferred to canvas from its original oak panel sometime after 1928; it is today held in the Robert Lehman collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to the art historian Maryan Ainsworth, the work is a "startlingly original image, rich in connotations for the viewer or worshiper".

In 1847, the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen described the panel as one of Memling's "finest and most original works".

The Annunciation was a popular theme in European art,[3] although a difficult scene to paint, because it depicts Mary's union with Christ as she becomes the tabernacle for the Word made flesh.

He has a richly embroidered red-and-gold brocade cope, edged with a pattern of gray seraphim and wheels, over a white alb and amice.

[10] He bends his knees, honoring and acknowledging her as Mother of Christ and Queen of Heaven,[1] and his feet are bare and positioned slightly behind hers.

[11] The Virgin is in a frontal view;[9] directly behind her the red-curtained bed acts as a framing device, similar to the traditional canopy of honor or baldachin.

[6] The art historian Penny Jolly suggests that the painting shows a birthing position, a motif with which van der Weyden experimented in his Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, where the Virgin's collapse results in a childbirth-like posture, and in his Descent from the Cross, which has Mary Magdalene bending and crouching – similar to the position Memling's Magdalene assumes in his Lamentation.

[4] A dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovers inside a rainbow-hued circle of light directly above the Virgin's head.

[14] A curtain sack, commonly found on beds of the period, hangs in the central axis between Gabriel and the attendant angel.

[15] A sideboard beside the bed contains two types of candles and a flask of water standing in bright light falling from the window to the left.

[11] Many elements emphasize Mary's role as the Mother of God; the chamber is furnished with simple everyday objects that indicate her purity.

[11] Charles Sterling describes the work as "one of the finest examples of Memling's ability to take a pictorial convention inherited from his predecessors and infuse it with a heightened sense of emotion and narrative complexity".

Millard Meiss notes that from the 12th century a common way to convey the conception was to compare light passing through glass to the passage of the Holy Spirit through the body of the Virgin.

[17] Saint Bernard likened it to sunshine, explaining in this passage: "Just as the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window without damaging it, and pierces its solid form with imperceptible subtlety, neither hurting when entering nor destroying when emerging; thus the word of God, the splendor of the Father, entered the virgin chamber and then came forth from the closed womb.

[20] The candleholder without a candle and the ropewick without flame symbolize the world before Christ's Nativity and the presence of his divine light, according to Ainsworth.

[23] There are no word scrolls or banderoles to indicate the Virgin's acceptance, yet her consent is obvious through her pose, which seems, according to Sterling, both submissive and active.

Blum notes that at a time "when artists did not hesitate to depict the breast of the Virgin, Memling did not shun her womb".

[15] Christ's humanity was a source of fascination, and it was only in Netherlandish art that a solution was found for visualizing his embryonic state with curtain-sacks draped to suggest the shape of a womb.

Viewers would have been reminded of the Crucifixion and Lamentation with the swoon, "thus anticipating Christ's sacrifice for the salvation of mankind at the moment of his conception".

[1] According to theologians, Mary stood with dignity at the Crucifixion of Jesus, but in 15th-century art she is depicted swooning, according to Jolly, "in agony at the sight of her dying son ... assuming the pose of a mother in the throes of the pain of childbirth".

[4] Memling presents the Virgin as the Bride of Christ about to assume her role as Queen of Heaven, with attendant angels indicating her royal status.

[26] Only a single previous version of such attendant angels has been found: in the Boucicaut Master's early 15th-century illuminated manuscript version of the "Visitation", the pregnant Virgin's long mantle is held by attendant angels, about which Blum notes that "her queenly appearance surely commemorates the moment when Mary is first addressed as Theotokos, the Mother of the Lord".

[27] The shutters on the right are copied from the Louvre panel, and the knotted curtain appears in the Saint Columba triptych's "Annunciation".

The effect is iridescent, according to Blum, who writes, "this shimmering surface gives [the figures] an unearthly quality, separating them from the more believable world of the bedchamber".

[28] Scholars have not established whether the panel was meant to be a single devotional work, or part of a larger, and now broken up, polyptych.

A late 19th-century photograph shows wood on all four sides of the painted surface, which suggests that the edges may have been extended during the transfer.