Beato Angelico's Annunciation of Cortona: divine light reflecting on earth

What place does Beato Angelico occupy in the development of Italian art? Pavel Pavlovič Muratov asked that question in 1929. And it is a question to which many scholars, more or less explicitly, have attempted to give an answer, trying to explain the reasons underlying that art so devout, so religiously inspired, sometimes so visionary, so much so that it was long wrongly branded as a kind of last late Gothic flare. One might respond with Maurizio Calvesi: Beato Angelico is a painter who “adheres to the new Renaissance principles and indeed promotes them, inserting an openly naturalistic vision into a sharp perspective structure,” and that medievalistic residue is "precisely in theadherence to an unshakable vision of Natura naturata, an unmovable nature as God created it, exempt from mobility, transformations and assimilation to the drama and turbulent agitations of the human sphere, to an overweening rationalism emulating God or to a presumptuous courtliness." This is why Beato Angelico’s art is new: it is an art that looks at reality, certainly, but it is a reality in which divinity is everywhere present and is revealed through light. An art made for thinking and not for contemplating.

By means of light, Giulio Carlo Argan pointed out, Blessed Angelico started from human experience to enable it to “rise to understand the supreme idea of being.” And there it is, that divine light, which in accordance with Thomist philosophy is reflected on earth and clothes with golden reflections that masterpiece that is Cortona’sAnnunciation . According to what we know, the altarpiece, which today can be admired in the Diocesan Museum of the splendid Tuscan town, was commissioned from Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole by a textile merchant, Giovanni di Cola di Cecco, who was a member of the confraternity of San Domenico in Cortona, and holder of the patronage of the chapel of the Annunciation in the very church of San Domenico. The panel was once thought to be the first of Beato Angelico’s Annunciations: today, however, critical orientations tend not to grant primacy to theAnnunciation of Cortona, which nevertheless remains one of Angelico’s most sublime creations.

Beato Angelico, Annunciation (c. 1434-1436; tempera on panel, 175 x 180 cm; Cortona, Museo Diocesano)

The announcing angel and the Virgin Annunciate stand under a Corinthian portico that recalls Brunelleschi’s architecture and is decorated, in the arch, with a tondo bearing the figure of the prophet Isaiah: the angel, in his pink robe woven with gold, has just arrived and catches the Madonna with the book still open, resting on his knees. Behind, a room opens where a red curtain can be glimpsed, and the porch vaults are dotted with stars: reminders of the Virgin’s clothing. She, with her blond hair gathered under her veil, seated on a brightly lit pew covered with a golden brocade cloth, decorated with circles divided into eight segments, crosses her hands over her breasts in devout respect for the divine messenger. She is serious, and she is serious because she is aware of what awaits her. Thus, she begins to embroider with the archangel the dialogue from Luke’s Gospel, rendered by the painter friar in golden letters that come out of their mouths: “Spiritus sanctus superveniet in te,” says the archangel. The Holy Spirit will descend upon you. “Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” replies the Virgin. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, let it come upon me that which your word proclaims. “Virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi,” the angel finally replies. The virtue of the Most High will spread its shadow over you.

The Renaissance innovations are to be grasped especially in the marble portico, foreshortened in oblique perspective until it guides the eye of the observer to the figures of Adam and Eve in the upper left corner, during the expulsion from the Earthly Paradise: this is the event that sanctions man’s estrangement from God, the original sin that Mary’s son will go on to redeem. The elongated figures of the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin move away from those seen in the PradoAnnunciation and the San Giovanni ValdarnoAnnunciation , with their more solid volumes: those in Cortona are more slender, and they reveal a rapprochement to Gibertian modes, opening a new phase in Angelico’s art. The two figures, wrote Domenico Tumiati in one of the finest descriptions of this scene, do not even look like human bodies, but “a scene enraptured to that garden perhaps which beyond the portico verdant: a golden dragonfly tending to a cerulean flower.” Tumiati noted how the rare pink of the angel’s robe, the pink of joy, was drawn from observing the flowers: “the color of the won rose, which is also assumed by the other roses, seen with their petals in dubious light.”

It would not be possible to imagine thisAnnunciation without flowers, without their symbolic value: and Beato Angelico, in the garden that refers to the biblical hortus conclusus, an allegory of Mary’s chastity, spreads a lush carpet of spring blooms. There are white roses, alluding to the purity of the Mother of God. The red ones, on the other hand, refer to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. There are four-leaf clovers symbolizing, precisely, the cross. The garden is then closed at the bottom by a palm tree: it too brings us back to the martyrdom of Jesus. The predella, on the other hand, tells the stories of Mary: so here are the Marriage of the Virgin, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Dormitio. The scene of the Visitation, moreover, opens on a marvelous and luminous glimpse of Lake Trasimeno, a blue glimpse of which can be admired from the hill to which Cortona clings, open toward the village of Castiglione del Lago, and it is roughly the true piece of landscape that can also be seen live from the most panoramic viewpoints: Anna Maria Maetzke called it “a surprisingly modern view,” an image “such as only those who have laboriously conquered a peak can enjoy, breathing heavily, like the woman climbing with provisions in the foreground.” And how can we not dwell on the Michellozzian perspective foreshortening of the basilica where the presentation takes place, or the delicate elegance of the wedding scene? The predella is a masterpiece within the masterpiece.

All the rest of the painting is poetry of light, whose verses declaim that mystery which, Georges Didi-Huberman wrote, “unfolds rigorously between these two surfaces, the one regular, curvilinear, celestial, the other irregular and terrestrial.” The green of the lawn and the dirty, earthy white of the marble portico, which becomes almost ochre inside, are the colors of the earth, enlivened, however, by the gold of divinity. And not only by the luminous epiphany of the Holy Spirit’s dove fluttering above the Virgin. It is a light that lives in the accents that the relative catches in the Virgin’s seat, in the haloes, in the wings and decorations of the archangel’s robe, in the stars of the vaults, but above all it is a terse and delicate light that radiates the whole scene. It is a light that exalts the world that Fra Angelico wanted to describe with a naturalistic flair, but which he believed was convincingly created by divinity. Without dwelling on this light, it would be difficult to understand the scope of his art.

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