Just a few days after Christmas seems a strange time to be posting something relating to the Annunciation, I know. I started to write this blog post a while ago and had intended for it to be published back in March. Life took over, as it does, and so that did not happen. Recently, in the run up to Yuletide, I found myself thinking about it again. I’m not exactly sure why, although there is a connection between the two events of course, other than I am slowly but surely writing up versions of various talks I’ve given. A slow process which should be done and dusted by now. Maybe I don’t need a reason to write about it, although I have personal reasons for thinking deeply about this subject. It is a fascinating painting which perhaps because of its simple depiction, the energy and power which it holds can be overlooked. Recently, I’ve also been looking at Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World where the model for the face of the Christ is in fact Christina Rossetti. In Ecce Ancilla Domini! and in its companion piece ‘The Childhood of Mary’, Christina is the model for Mary. In 1853 when Holman Hunt was busy creating the first version of the The Light of the World, he noted that ‘appreciating the gravity and sweetness of expression possessed by Miss Christina Rossetti, I felt that she might make a valuable sitter for the painting of the head….she kindly agreed’*. (The beard belonged to, I think, a political refugee from Paris who was lodging above where Holman Hunt was living at the time and the model for the hair was Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti’s wife). So Rossetti’s sister modelled first for the figure and face of Mary in two of her brother’s works, and then a couple of years later, for the face of the son, in a work produced by another member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Back to the work in question. ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini!’, a very early work, painted between 1849 and 1850 when Rossetti was only 21 years old, translates from the Latin as ‘Behold the Handmaid of the Lord’. Later, thinking that the Latin form was too ‘high church’, the artist changed the name to quite simply ‘The Annunciation’. It is of course, at least as written in the Gospel of Luke, when the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary and informs her that she is to have a child. The work is signed DGR on the bottom left hand corner, with the word March added – either because he finished it in March, or he is referring to the month of the Feast of the Annunciation. This early signature differs from how he signed his later work. Inspired by one of his favourite painters, Albrecht Dürer, he developed a monogram of his own initials DGR. The painting was originally supposed to form part of a diptych – a double panel – with the other panel depicting the death of Mary. That was never started and this partly explains the narrowness of the work which Rossetti also resized slightly and reframed much later in his life, in 1874. The original frame with Latin mottos he deemed ‘Popish’ in sentiment. It is the second completed oil painting that he produced, the first being the ‘Childhood of the Virgin’ or simply ‘The Childhood of Mary’ as I prefer to call it which is shown in the final illustration. It is the last painting by him to be publicly exhibited in his lifetime. After it was shown at the then Old Portland Gallery in Regent Street, London, it did not meet with critical acclaim and the artist withdrew from exhibiting in public, concentrating on working for private clients.
Mary. She looks so vulnerable and confused about what is going on, shrunk right back with fear. Such a human response to the news that she has just received. Here she is shown wearing a simple white tunic, sitting on her bed having just awoken and not in prayer or reading a missal as she is usually depicted. John Ruskin noted that placing Mary on the bed was an original idea. Perhaps it was taken from reading art historian Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary in Art, which along with Legends of the Madonna as Represented in Art were valuable resources for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. White. The colour most associated with the Divine. I mention more about my thoughts on the whiteness of the work a few paragraphs below .
The blue robe hanging behind her. Blue. Lapis lazuli. The colour most associated with her, as well as red, of course, and is the pigment favoured by Renaissance artists in their depictions of her. In fact, the deep blue colour used by artists at that time is ultramarine – which means ‘beyond the sea’-
created by grinding lapis lazuli into a powder. This incredibly expensive pigment was used widely in Europe from around the 12th century. Another blue, Egyptian blue, a pigment created by the Ancient Egyptians approximately 4,500 years ago, had gone out of use after the end of the Roman Empire but was rediscovered in the early 19th century by the eminent scientist and chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Blue was incredibly important to the ancient Egyptians and was associated with the heavens,
fertility, birth, and rebirth to name just a few of the reasons why. The stone lapis lazuli was sacred to them, of course, but it was expensive and had to be imported from the region of Afghanistan. Egyptian blue was developed by them to help fulfil the need to depict the colour, and this synthetically produced calcium copper silicate is the earliest artificial pigment. Copper, the ruling element associated with Venus. This would be a perfect choice of pigment to honour a Goddess. I’m not saying that the pigment used in the painting is in fact Egyptian blue, but it may be a nod by Rossetti in that direction.
We see Mary depicted with red hair in honour of the cosmic Mother Goddess, the model for the hair being a Miss Love. The angel Gabriel is seen hovering, naked beneath the white robe, his angelic status shown by the fire at his feet and the halo. Apparently, Rossetti set some alcohol on fire in order to see the full impact of flames bursting into life. There were various models for Gabriel, including one of the original members of the PRB Thomas Woolner, but the profile is of the artist’s brother, William Michael. This presence adds to the charged energy emanating from the work and the narrowness of the painting showing Mary recoiling in the corner with seemingly no way out adds to this, too. It is actually quite stifling. For me, it’s not just the news that she has been given that unnerves her so, but also a premonition of how her own personal story – and that of her family’s – will be taken from her and distorted in order to satisfy the agendas of the establishment and keep us all in our place. She looks trapped. Left without a say in the matter. Perhaps that is what Rossetti is also indicating here.
At the bottom of the bed on a stand we see an embroidery of lilies and Gabriel is holding the stem of a lily pointing directly at Mary’s womb. You can see three lilies on the stem. The Trinity. One a bud waiting to bloom, which is a nice gentle touch, I think. The embroidery connects to the Childhood of Mary, shown at the bottom of this post, and which when I was in the gallery, hung opposite Ecce Ancilla Domini! There you can see the lily growing and Mary working on the embroidery which is shown again, finished, in Ecce Ancilla Domini! In both paintings, Christina Rossetti is the model for Mary. Her mother, Frances, is the model for Mary’s mother, Anne, and the family servant Williams is Joachim, father of Mary, seen pruning the vine.
My own admiration for work by Early Renaissance artists must surely contribute to why I find Ecce Ancilla Domini! so intriguing. Artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Fra Angelico painted beautiful depictions of this scene. These artists and others of the time were of course a huge influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Rossetti who, especially during the first half of his career, were inspired by the work of Northern Renaissance artists such as the ones I have mentioned. In the autumn of 1849, he travelled with his PRB brother William Holman Hunt to France and Belgium ( a trip which was made possible due to the sale of the Childhood of Mary). The highpoint of the trip came in Bruges where they saw works by van Eyck and Memling, and by Botticelli in Paris. Influenced by this, Rossetti started work on his ‘Annunciation’ immediately on his return to London. To look further at these influences, perspective, and spatial arrangement in the work, it is worth looking here for further insights:
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s44.rap.html
The indispensable Rossetti Archive suggests:
‘The famous “whiteness” of this painting may well owe more to Dante than to any painting; it recalls the relief images of the Annunciation that Dante sees in Canto X of the Purgatorio, which are carved in white marble’. Given Rossetti’s deep knowledge of Dante’s work, this seems highly probable. I was thinking about this during a visit to the V&A in London, when I walked into the sculpture court and right in front of me, hanging on the wall, was a white frieze depicting the scene in question. That was a sign to me that there was something in this theory. Over the years, Rossetti has had a way of getting messages to me in rather unorthodox ways and I feel that this was one of them. I plan to get back there soon and will look to see if the frieze is hanging. It was difficult to photograph before but the sculpture court has since been rearranged and if the frieze is still there, perhaps it is easier to view and to photograph now.
During my time at Tate Britain, I only managed to talk about Ecce Ancilla Domini! a couple of times before it was removed and sent out on loan to an exhibition somewhere. I stood and watched the day the art handlers carefully installed it on a cart and wheeled it away in the direction of the lift. Where was such a precious item going? However, I’m so glad that I took the time to look at it much more closely before it left the building. By the time it was reinstalled in the gallery, (please see note below)** I’d decided for various reasons to stop preparing and giving talks which had mostly been very successful. They were short, but inevitably went on for longer with listeners waiting behind at the end to ask questions or discuss. Some included audience participation and poetry reading. People jumped at the chance to take part and I learned so much from them, too. Like, for example, that Rossetti’s sonnet for his later work Proserpine was written in medieval Italian. In the language of Dante. Of course. What else would Rossetti write in than the language of the poet he so much admired and whose entire work he had translated by the age of fifteen. Please see an earlier blog post ‘Proserpine: Digging Deeper with Rossetti’ for more information about that and about the life of the artist.
Earlier this year I purchased some inks from L. Cornellisen & Son, the art supply shop close to the British Museum which was established in 1855, and still uses the original cabinets for storing the vast choice of high quality paints and brushes. The inks were for a project I’m working on which that medium works well for. I’d been using historical inks, which are wonderful, but needed something a bit more vibrant. My eye fell on the pomegranate, burnt orange, and renaissance gold creations from Roberson’s, who I later looked up and found to my amazement that they had in fact been suppliers to Rossetti, Sir Edward Burne – Jones, William Morris, William de Morgan and Turner to name just a few. Their shop at 51 Long Acre, Covent Garden, had opened in 1810, and remained there until 1937 when the business moved to north London. It has since been bought over and moved to west London but is now trade only. The company website states that ‘ the company prepared its own paints and manufactured a wide range of materials to recipes that were kept secret and actively protected. Some of these recipes are still used today’.
The story of Roberson’s is worthy of a blog post all of its own of course, but I thought that since I had more or less just discovered that I’m currently using inks created by a firm with such an illustrious clientele which included Rossetti himself, it should be mentioned here. I don’t know if the oil paint used to paint Ecce Ancilla Domini! was purchased by Rossetti from Roberson’s but it is nice to think that it might have been. The Roberson Archive is kept at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge and there exists an Index of Account Holders from 1820 – 1939. More information can be found here:
https://www.hki.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/archives/roberson
There is so much more to share about this painting but it requires much deeper contemplation and careful wording. As always with Rossetti, there are many layers of meaning to discuss. I hope that, in time, I will come to write about it again.
*Quoted in Holman Hunt and the Light of the World by Jeremy Maas. Page 38. Edition published by Wildwood House, 1987. First published by Scholar Press, 1984.
** Ecce Ancilla Domini! now hangs alongside other works by Rossetti and fellow Pre-Raphaelites in room 10, Beauty as Protest, 1845 – 1905 at Tate Britain. Check that it is hanging first before you visit, though, just in case it is on loan or in conservation.
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