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LEO STEINBERG
"How shall this be, since I know not a man?" - was she asking,
words of St. Bernard: "Was it not into her womb that the fullness
by the Holy Ghost "coming upon" her, and by the power of the
by the angel, the first, the superveniet in te, was too vague to
suffice, then the begetful ray on which the Dove glides toward
Mary in shadow. Both terms beg the question in that they keep
aloof from the virginal body, the site of the miracle. For to
Dove's beak expels its own rays.5 In the imagery of Filippo Lippi,
these rays may relay or double the jet discharged by the Father,
[Figs. 4, 5].
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vectors.8 Only when they leave the mouth of the Father or the bill
of the Dove are the rays interpretable as afflatus, and even then
they allow yet another meaning. They may signify the Word of
Virgin conceived through the ear, the right ear. And this fantasy -
point focus. But the Madonna, from halo down, was a large
target, and their pictures are evidence that some Renaissance
painters wanted a narrower mark. Accustomed by perspectival
practice to tracing directional lines that converged with precision, they began answering curious questions. For instance:
Would the avian sign of the Holy Ghost forfeit its ethereality if it
none demanded more tact in the telling, for surely the very
the virginal Eve had conceived the word of the serpent, thereby
conceived faith and joy when the angel brought the glad
tidings. 12
26
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and the whole human race, so the other became the cause of
salvation for herself and all humankind. Eve was averted from
to be loosened again in the way in which it was tied. "13 Note that
i1't
4th century that the act of listening is itself mystified and the
auricular conception becomes explicit. Disengaged from its
appears detached from its typological origin: "Deus per angelum loquebatur et Virgo per aurem impregnebatur. "18 There can
be no doubt that Augustine intended the formula in a spiritual
sense. His phrase "God spoke through the angel" was to be
causally understood; it meant that the very words heard by Mary
were the seeding by which she conceived. But other exegetes,
increasingly carnal.
St. Zeno, Bishop of Verona (d. 372), has Christ himself, not
merely the angel's message, "entering by the ear." Similarly,
evading the Augustinian equation, preferred to separate Gabriel's speech from the entering godhead. For St. Gaudentius
(Bishop of Brescia, c. 400, and friend of St. Ambrose), the trope
has become wholly physical:
everlasting bliss. 17
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audible speech, no matter how spiritually intended, the Latins as the Greeks would have judged them - claimed to know more
about the mysterious quomodo of the Incarnation than was
high.21
region through the ear of the Virgin, and exits through the
golden gate. 19
28
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rebuke. Photius' angel has closed his initial address to the Virgin
way of the ear? Photius objects and leaves ears to their task of
hearing. What the Virgin received through the ear was not the
But what did the most-holy Virgin reply to this? Was she
her ears wide with pleasure, did she allow her thoughts to
give assent without scrutiny? Not at all. But what says she?
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perplexity all the more. For how shall this be to me, seeing I
shall this be? One thing I know, one thing I have been taught,
know not a man? For every birth comes from intercourse with
one thing I have been sent to tell [... ]. The Holy Ghost shall
this be?"
[...] I praise the miracle in song, and worship the birth, but I
am at a loss to tell the manner of the conception.
30
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ffi
RI
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jet steers clear of its mark. And though Lippi returns to the
subject again and again, testing the expressibility of its mystery,
he does not revert to the per aurem fiction. It is as though the
doctrine were acknowledged only to be played down. By and
receptive organ had been displaced? Did they think the per
aurem motif ineffectual, because the device of the Dove at the
apostrophe reads:
nesis? Granted that God can work miracles, but since God's
ear. But whether we are thereby shown what Mary was hearing
32
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~~~~~~~~~__
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miiiiuii
tion panel [Fig. 6] begins upper left with God the Father
window, the beam pours into the Virgin's chamber, carries the
Dove along, and comes to rest under her heart, settling there in
and wings to her womb. What is the artist trying to tell us? That
34
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Mary's womb, and not twelve inches away. Look closer, and
doxy, was rethinking the familiar event with astonishing independence of mind is apparent from his disregard of the
scriptural text - the one certainty to hold on to. The Holy Ghost,
the angel told Mary, would "overshadow" her, would literally
"come upon" her; and the prefix in the term supervenio is not to
. .. ..........
alone brings it down to earth and profiles the Dove in the nether
First: May the light from the Virgin's womb betray the divine
presence within? In this interpretation, the rays from the Dove
the gleam issuing from the Madonna - the sign of the Word's
the Light she bore within could have no weight. She became the
window of heaven [... ].34 Visual parallels for such symbolism
exist, but they are rare and somewhat unorthodox. For we read
in the Fathers that the enwombed Christ, whether thought of as
respective effulgences from Dove and womb are consubstantial, reciprocal, and about to commingle.
Second alternative: If we are seeing one compound event,
may we interpret the action as a collapsed temporal sequence?
The angel has spoken; he has won Mary's consent; now spends
the Spirit and sets the womb aglow with the Word's presence.
35
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Li .'::!- ;:.>..
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a.
11) Filippo Lippi, (Annunciation)), c. 1440, New York, The Frick Collection (copyright).
36
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Perhaps. But note that the sequence breaks; the crucial link in
the causal chain is passed over. We see radiation from the Dove
bound for the womb, and see the cloistered godhead allegedly
clear why the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity should, at
this denouement, persist in flashing light signals at one another.
Yet this improbability is what the proposed alternative would
have us see.
taste [...],'" and so on? Or was the bond passing from God to
Mary designed to neutralize sense by confounding our speciali-
God coming upon the Virgin "as dew in April," or "like a divine
fire" (St. Bonaventure), or as a voice, or again as "a fallen flare
through the hollow of an ear" is not anomalous after all,
poetically speaking.
But the Renaissance master painter, committed to the
Nationalmuseum.
38
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spread before our eyes spread too thin? And are pictures
of visual perception.
not light of all substances the most spirit-like and God's most
with sight, and thus it prepares for the approach of the species
light - by reciprocation.
In the London Annunciation, Mary's womb is impregnated by
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perception gave Lippi his operational metaphor for the phenomenon of the Incarnation. Edgerton shows that the Dove's
sacred union. And as the eye is the proper portal of love, so the
tion. The Virgin's responding womb, like the eye when it hails
the light, "alters and ennobles the medium" through which the
for its metaphoricity. But it was the last time that the mystery of
poets. For as the eye outranks the ear, so does the painted
image surpass poetic diction: a claim for the supremacy of the
painter's art in which Lippi anticipates a younger Florentine -
Leonardo da Vinci.
How likely is it that this genial monk would have delved into
exotica such as the Baconian theory of perception? With this
rhetorical question, I yield the floor confidently to my partner.
40
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For St. Augustine, and explicitly for St. Bernard, Mary's response to
the angel expresses concern over her vow of virginity. Bernard has her
say: "If it behooves me to break my vow in order to bear such a son, I
both rejoice in the son and grieve at the disposition. His will be done.
But if I may conceive virginally and virginally give birth, which, if it please
Him shall not be impossible, then shall I know that He has truly regarded
the low estate of His handmaid" (Super missus est, hom. IV, 3, Pat. lat.
183, col. 80).
The third alternative is the canonic. Thus St. Ambrose: "She
doubted not of the effect, but only inquired as to the mode of that
effect" (De spirito sancto, III, 11; trans. Thomas Livius, The Blessed
Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries, London, 1893, p. 131).
As summarized by Yrjo Him, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry
and Art of the Catholic Church (1909), Boston, 1957, p. 287: Mary's
3 Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 73; trans. Henry Chadwick, rev. ed.,
Cambridge, England, 1965, p. 386.
4 In addition to Figs. 1 and 2, the following are outstanding examples
of Annunciation scenes with rays issuing from God's mouth: Bernardo
Daddi's panel in the Louvre; the Parement Master, Tres Belles Heures
de Notre-Dame, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, nouv. acq. lat. 3093, fol.
2; a popular Swabian woodcut of c. 1450, Schreiber 27a; Gerolamo di
Giovanni (act. 1449-73), Camerino, Pinacoteca Civica; and the late
15th-century panel by Benedetto Bonfigli [Fig. 8].
The motif of the Dove proceeding as though by exhalation from the
mouth of God occurs in Lorenzo Veneziano's Annunciation of 1357 at
the Venice Accademia; and in the Virgin and Child fresco fragment by
Domenico Veneziano, London, National Gallery. Remarkable instances
of the Dove proceeding, by exhalation, both from the Father and from
the Son (filioque) are the Avignon School Retable de Bourbon in the
Louvre, and, probably, the Coronation by Enguerrand Quarton, Villeneuve-les-Avignon.
5 Rays issuing from the mouth of the Dove occur in the Annunciations by the Master of the Barberini Panels and by Filippo Lippi (both in
9 For the Gaude Virgo hymn and its popularity, see Hirn, op. cit., p.
297.
conflated this imagery with the Byzantine type of Nativities (e. g., the
mosaic at the Martorana, Palermo), where a ray falls from a star upon
the newborn Christ Child.
11 A direct derivation of the per aurem theme from ancient preChristian myths is wrongly assumed in Ernest Jones, "The Madonna's
Conception Through the Ear: A Contribution to the Relation between
Cologne, 1966, pp. 26-29; and in Hans von Campenhausen, The Virgin
Birth in the Theology of the Early Church, London, 1964, pp. 38-41.
cit., p. 38 n. 1.
42
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17 Zeno of Verona, Tractatus, XIII, 10, Pat. lat. 11, col. 352: "And
because the devil, creeping in through the ear by temptation, had
wounded and given death to Eve, Christ, entering by the ear to Mary,
dried up all the vices of the heart, and cured the woman's wound by
being born of the Virgin" (trans. Jones, op. cit.). Ephraem Syrus, De
divers. serm. I, Opp. Syr., p. 607; trans. Jones, op. cit., p. 292.
18 Quoted in Hirn, op. cit., p. 296.
19 Ibid., for the passage from St. Gaudentius. St. Eleutherius, Serm.
in Annunt. Fest., LXV, quoted in Livius, op. cit., p. 140. The Latin text of
the quotation from St. Agobard, from De correctione antiphonarii, 8,
breast of the Father; see, for example, the Cologne School panel of c.
1415-20, reprod. in Vor Stefan Lochner: Die Kolner Maler von 1300 bis
1430, exh. cat., Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1974, no. 28 and
p. 168. For the ab arce patris motif in Annunciation scenes, see Fig. 12.
20 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII, 3, 33, trans. H. E. Butler,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1920; see also II, 14, 1-4. The Greek Bible
writes logos at the opening of St. John's Gospel. But in Luke's wording
nativitatem oratorio, Pat. gr., 56, col. 392). The Latin translation in
Migne employs verbum in both instances.
For a naively literal representation of verbum in medieval imagery,
see the 13th-century stone sculpture at Bamberg Cathedral, where the
24 St. Bernard, Sermo II in festo Pentecostes, Pat. lat. 183, col. 327:
"missus est interim Gabriel angelus a Deo, ut verbum patris per aurem
si den vil suezen" ("through her ear she conceived the most sweet");
quoted in Karl Kunstle, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, I, Freiburg
i. Br., 1928, p. 339.
For the Gaude Virgo hymn, see above, n. 9.
25 "Diu botschaft gie zeTr oran in der hailig gaist flos damit in der
worht in ir libe daz das cristus got und mensche waz"; quoted in Hirn,
op. cit., p. 298.
26 Quoted in Jones, op. cit., p. 269. In a sermon preached on March
13, 1661, Bossuet spoke of "her who first conceived the Son of God
through the ear"; see Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the
Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942), trans. Beatrice
Gottlieb, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, p. 162 n. 20.
burg Altar) and 105 [our Fig. 3], the absurdly telephonic Wurzburg
Cathedral tympanum, where God blows down through a tube that
presumably attaches to Mary's right ear.
Gentile's panel at the Villa I Tatti, Florence [Fig. 7], and Gerolamo di
Giovanni's panel in Camerino, Pinacoteca Civica. See also the Annunciations by Crivelli (London), Benedetto Bonfigli [Fig. 8], and the early
16th-century Mantuan tapestry, made for Francesco Gonzaga, now in
The Art Institute of Chicago [Fig. 9]. A striking late 16th-century
instance (to which Mr. Robert Dance kindly drew my attention) is Jacob
Matham's engraved Annunciation [Fig. 10] after Giuseppe Valeriano's
altarpiece in the Gesu, Rome.
29 Rabelais, I, 6: "[... ] the cotyledons of the matrix were loosened at
the top, and the child leapt up through them to enter the hollow vein.
Then, climbing through the diaphragm to a point above the shoulders
where this vein divides in two, he took the left fork and came out by the
2 Hesychius, De sanct. Maria deip., IV, Pat. gr. 93, col. 1453; trans.
Livius, op. cit., p. 141.
43
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Conclusion: Christ did not pass through the normal stages of embryonic
development, but was a perfect body joined to its soul and complete in
all the parts of a man from the instant of his conception. However, this
reasoning does not alter the physiology of the Virgin, which submitted
to the single sufficient miracle of the unbroken hymen.
32 One earlier image may be relevant here. Nuremberg's Germanisches Nationalmuseum preserves a life-size stone-carved Annunciation group of c. 1360, acquired in 1927 from the Nuremberg Frauenkirche [Fig. 14]; see The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gothic and
Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1550, exh. cat., New York,
1986, no. 5, with bibliography, to which should be added Gregor
Martin Lechner, Maria Gravida: Zu Schwangerschaftsmotiv der bildenden Kust, Zurich, 1981, p. 17 and no. 10. The statue of the Annunciate
shows her, proleptically, in advanced pregnancy - the type of the
Madonna gravida. In its present, reworked condition, the Virgin's belly
supports her left hand. But the hand is modern. According to Kurt
Martin (Die Nurnberger Steinplastik im XIV Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1927,
no. 55), it is the result of an alteration ordered by the local clergy in
1879-80. In the original state, it was the Dove of the Holy Ghost that
perched on the belly. Unfortunately, this crucial feature is not well
attested. Martin's information was received orally from one Baumeister
Goschel, recounting a recollection then nearly half a century old. How
reliable was Goschel's recall? We know of no other Annunciation
energy. As Donne's ecstatic lovers gaze upon one another "our eyebeams twisted, and did thred / our eyes, upon one double string [... ]."
Blind Milton loses the power of sight when his "light is spent." A glance
that "sweeps" sky or horizon goes forth like a searchlight. A look may
be caressing or piercing; either way, it is felt to impinge, to weigh on its
object. Even the photographic camera is said to "shoot." It is in fact
difficult to avoid feeling that one's focused look is active out there, like
one's grasp, one's raised voice, or blown breath.
37 Lindberg, op. cit., p. 115.
44
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