| Dec. 2nd, 2008 08:00 pm 1st December Last year, I brought you the Naked Baby Jesus Advent Calendar, because some laws are very poorly thought-out.
This year I'm not trying to make any particular point, I'm just doing this to share the bizarre, intriguing and beautiful Christmas-related art of the middle ages and fifteenth-century that I particularly like. Jesus may well be present, and in varying stages of undress, but not in every image.
Let's begin slap bang in the middle of the Renaissance!
Fra Angelico
Annunciation
Between 1439 and 1443
Fresco
176 x 148 cm
This is painted on the wall of a monk's cell (bedroom) in the convent of San Marco, Florence.
See here for an embiggenatable version.
Fra Angelico (not his real name, merely a nickname he developed for his painting style and personal habits being so goddamned awesome angelic) painted several annunciations, of which this one has the simplest setting. The vaulting above Gabriel and the Virgin corresponds with the simple groin vaulting in the convent itself. The pale colours haven't faded significantly over the centuries, btw, they're meant to be like that.
Anyway, I thought that this would be a nice painting with which to (belatedly, sorry about that :P) begin this year's online advent calendar. Fra Angelico is famous for his annunciation which appears at the top of the stairs in the convent, but this one painted for an individual monk's cell tends to be far less well known. Current Mood:  awake
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Neither. It's St Stephen. You can tell because of the rivulets of blood running down his head. He was martyred by stoning, and thus is usually depicted with a stone in hand - as in
this painting by the French artist Jean Fouquet, and with blood seeping out of his head.
Good guess that he's a monk :) as he wears the habit of a monastic order. It wouldn't be a portrait in that context, but St Stephen could well have been chosen for that cell if he was the patron saint of the monk who lived there while Fra Angelico was working. I shall have to check this...
Just in case you're interested... St Stephen isn't actually meant to be thought of as being in the same space as Gabriel and the Virgin, even though he's depicted in the same physical setting. He's an outside looking in, just like the monk looking at the painting in his cell. And like the monk, St Stephen is meditating on the miracle of the annunciation. It's partly instructional - showing that you can visualise or use an image to visualise an object of devotion - and partly to do with intercession: St Stephen is the middle step between the monk in his cell and the Blessed Virgin herself.
Edited at 2008-12-03 22:57 (UTC) 
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