Artists throughout the centuries have tried to capture the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will become the mother of God. These depictions attempt to approach the unapproachable, to capture even a fleeting glance of that moment of all moments: the instance in which the infinite God, whose essence exceeds every category of thought and exists beyond being itself, quickened into frail, embryonic finitude in the womb of a human woman.
In some instances she is sitting, and others standing, surrounded by the comfortable trappings of ordinary life. Her counterpart, an angelic visitor, is sometimes bedecked in radiance, and sometimes cloaked in unassuming traveler’s clothes. Sometimes no angel is portrayed at all, only a beam of light. In some representations, our heroine is placid; in others, she shields her eyes against a blinding brightness.
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