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The Annunciation of the Lord
Pierre-Marie Dumont
Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (c. 1600)
El Greco (1541–1614)
“I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and commended myself earnestly to him,” says Saint Teresa of Ávila (?? 1582) in her autobiography. But she did not think devotion to Saint Joseph was a private grace given to her alone: “If anyone cannot find a master to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious saint as his master and he will not go astray.”
Saint Joseph emerges
During and after Teresa’s lifetime, public devotion to Saint Joseph experienced its most dramatic period of growth in all of Christian history. Writers, painters, mystics, and Christians of all walks of life found themselves newly drawn to Saint Joseph, fueled in part by the Council of Trent’s emphasis on the Scriptures as the basis for devotion to the saints and on sacred images as a means of encounter with them, and in part by the personal experience of Saint Joseph’s paternal love in the writings of mystics like Teresa. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Church could keep silent about the “silent saint” no longer.
In the year 1597, the expatriate Greek painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco) received a commission to paint a chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph in Toledo, Spain, intended for the use of Teresa of Ávila’s Discalced Carmelites. El Greco created memorable images of Saint Martin of Tours, the Virgin and Child, and the Coronation of the Virgin as framing paintings for the altar’s reredos, but the central image that still dominates the altarpiece is a greater-than-life-size image of Saint Joseph. In preparation, El Greco made a complete small-format study of the image (reproduced here), which today can be found tucked away in the sacristy of Toledo’s magnificent cathedral.
Saint Joseph among us
El Greco’s image harnesses the energy of the universal Church’s new devotion to Saint Joseph and makes it breathtakingly particular and concrete. El Greco presents Joseph as a young father with a dark brown beard and hair just beginning to thin, with corded laborer’s muscles apparent in his neck, arms, and legs. One arm reaches down to return Jesus’ embrace and the other holds a crooked staff, marking him as a pilgrim on a journey—or is it a shepherd at home? His bare feet are poised for action, his right foot pressing into the dirt of the path while his left heel lifts in preparation for the step that will take him directly into the viewer’s presence. Down in the deep background is another sign of how close Joseph is to the viewer: the hilltop skyline of Toledo itself forms the setting for the encounter. This is not Saint Joseph as an abstract ideal, or as seen from afar: he is here, a real father whose real love for Jesus comes to be where we are, and invites us to share in it.
Saint Joseph through Jesus’ eyes
Jesus’ bright red garment naturally draws the viewer’s eyes, as does the disarmingly intimate and childlike arm that Jesus stretches up to throw around Joseph’s waist. But it’s Jesus’ eyes that tell us what we’re seeing: turned unexpectedly toward the viewer even though his pose suggests they should be returning Joseph’s gaze, his eyes reveal that we are looking at Saint Joseph from Christ’s perspective.
Amazingly, El Greco manages to convey in a single image both the real human gaze of the boy Jesus and the true divine sight of the Eternal Word.
El Greco’s characteristically elongated bodies here serve to emphasize Joseph’s height, allowing the viewer to see him towering over Jesus, just as many people’s childhood memories exaggerate their own father’s height and the size of his embrace, however diminutive the real man may have been. At the same time, the viewer sees the heavens revolving around Saint Joseph in a pure burst of celestial sight. Far from being mere observers, the angels physically surround Saint Joseph, circling around his head in gravity-defying whorls while spilling out visible manifestations of his glories: a lily for his chaste virginity, roses for heavenly splendor, the laurel-leaf crown of imperishable glory (cf. 1 Cor 9:25).
Behold your father
Speaking from the Cross, Jesus hands the Virgin Mary to the Church as the universal Mother of the Church and the mother in faith of every individual believer. El Greco’s image has Jesus offer Saint Joseph to the Church and to each Christian in a similar way, but rather than speaking as the triumphant king from the throne of the Cross, he speaks as a humble child, who as the Son of God nonetheless chooses to need the strength, dedication, and tenderness of a father on earth. In his own time, El Greco’s image offered a much-needed insight into Saint Joseph as a real father, whose perfect chastity was the wellspring for his paternal charity. In our time of increasing fatherlessness, El Greco offers us an even more fundamental insight: that the fatherhood of Saint Joseph is a perpetual witness to the holiness of fatherhood and its place in the life of every Christian, regardless of what the father they have known was like.
A child who has a loving father naturally imagines the whole universe rotating around the solid pillar of his father’s love; in one wild, exhilarating glimpse, El Greco shows this childhood fantasy coming true in the person of Saint Joseph, who receives his fatherhood from the Eternal Son and so lives on earth as the father of the one whom earth and sea and sky adore—and our father as well.
Father Gabriel Toretta, o.p.
Dominican priest of the Province of Saint Joseph and doctoral student at the University of Chicago, where he studies the history of the theology of beauty in the Carolingian era.
Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (c. 1600), El Greco (1541–1614), Toledo Cathedral (sacristy), Toledo, Spain. © Bridgeman Images.
(Read More)
This Annunciation illustrates a prestigious illuminated manuscript commissioned around the year 1530 from Simon Bening (c. 1483–1561) by the powerful Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg (1490–1545), Archbishop of Mainz, a prince-elector and Archchancellor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. The cardinal was a friend and lavish patron of artists (notably of Cranach and Grünewald) and at first favored the reform of the Church demanded by the “Evangelicals” (so the Protestants were called in Germany), but ultimately he remained faithful to the Roman Catholic Church and took a stance as one of the most brilliant adversaries of Martin Luther (1483–1546).
Born at the time of the irresistible rise of printing (the Gutenberg Bible dates back to 1450) and the art of the woodcut that accompanied it, Simon Bening, a star of the school of Bruges (Belgium), performed the swan song of the miniature (a painting with lead-based pigments, “minium,” used to decorate manuscripts), taking this art to its highest artistic level before it disappeared. Note that three of his six daughters had successful careers as painters or art dealers. One of them, Levina, even became the official miniaturist of the court of England and succeeded Hans Holbein the Younger as portraitist of King Henry VIII.
The moment when the Word was made flesh
Mary is in her room, allegorically depicted as a grandiose structure to signify that this is the Temple that from now on will shelter the new Holy of Holies, the dwelling place where God makes himself really present to the world in a way surpassing all that the human mind could hope. Indeed, seated on a low stool, with her hands crossed over her heart, Mary has just answered the angel: Be it done to me according to your word. Here she is, captured by the painter at the ineffable moment when the Word was made flesh in her virginal womb.
The Angel Gabriel is depicted hovering motionless. In his left hand he holds something resembling a scepter, which in reality is reminiscent of the wand or staff that heralds in Byzantium used to carry when they went through the streets announcing the solemn proclamations of the emperor. Embroidered along the border of his mantle are the words that he has just addressed to the Virgin Mary. On his head he wears a golden crown: a ring of fleurs-de-lis—in honor of the Immaculata—with a cross at the front. Since the salvation of the world is at stake, the announcement of Mary’s motherhood already takes place under the sign of the cross. Mary’s consent to her divine motherhood is also her consent to the sword that will pierce her heart.
The inauguration of the new and eternal covenant
On the floor in the foreground, a Delft vase displays a bouquet of flowers that symbolize the eminent qualities of the Virgin Mary, above all the lily of purity and the humility of the meadow flowers. Beside it the viewer discovers a seemingly abandoned velvet bag, the kind which in those days was used to protect a precious manuscript, a Book of the Hours, or a Bible. This one held the book of the Old Testament, which is set on the little side table next to the Virgin Mary. This bag is empty and on the ground to indicate that the old covenant becomes obsolete precisely because it is inexpressibly fulfilled by the Incarnation of God’s Son in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Yet a phylactery has slipped out of the bag; on it is written this prophecy from the Book of Isaiah: Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son (Is 7:14). Instead of looking at the angel, or even reading the prophecy, Mary contemplates the book on her knees in which is written—live coverage, you might say—the beginning of the Gospel and the inauguration of the new and eternal covenant.
Behind the Blessed Virgin, a sewing basket alludes to the old depictions that appeared as early as the Romanesque period, especially in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, showing the Blessed Virgin with a distaff, spinning flax. At the moment when she was surprised by the angel’s visit, Mary was weaving a white cloth that would become Christ’s shroud. We see here the start of that cloth hanging over the edge of the basket.
In a corner, behind the angel at the back of the room, the artist represented an alcove containing an unused nuptial bed. The purpose of this symbol is to make it clear to everyone that there was indeed a conception of a son of man, but without the marital relations that naturally produce that result.
Finally, through the window, the viewer sees the enclosed garden, the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs (4:12), which prefigures the Virgin Mother of God:
Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa;
hortus conclusus, fons signatus. (Vulgate)
My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed;
A garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up. (Douay-Rheims)
(Read More)The Annunciation, Simon Bening (c. 1483–1561), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.