If the highest vocation of art is to unite the heavenly to the earthly, the famous altarpiece of the Annunciation by Blessed Fra Angelico, preserved in the Prado Museum in Madrid, is certainly one of the most successful endeavours to fulfil this calling.
Usually seen in art history as a transitional work between Gothic and Renaissance painting, this piece can provoke Byzantine polemics if the attempt is made to fit it into a particular period exclusively on the basis of technique and interpretation, without taking into account the spirit that gave it life.
Yearning for transcendence and sublimity
It is undeniable that this painting reflects a purely medieval worldview. The “platform frame” on which it rests, formed by five other biblical scenes that complete the altarpiece, indicates that it was designed as a narrative ensemble at the service of divine worship, a purpose fulfilled while it remained in the chapel of the Convent of San Domenico in the Italian city of Fiesole.
Driven by fervent religiosity and analogical reasoning, medieval artists saw iconography as an open window to other realities, seeking to represent supernatural beings in their own atmosphere. Unwilling to limit themselves to portraying our simple material world, they made use of gilded backgrounds and even the intentional modification of natural perspective in order to transport the viewer from the earthly context to the spiritual dimension. In their holy endeavour to make perceptible what is visible only to the eyes of the soul, they created sublime settings, adorned in a manner conducive to prayer and transcendence.
The entire painting of the Annunciation is illuminated by this piety brimming with innocence, which seeks – through beautiful and orderly forms, pure and bright colours – to point to its archetypes. It clearly conveys a message aimed at extolling evident supernatural virtues; for example, the recollection and unpretentiousness of Mary Most Holy, or the respect and humility of the Archangel St. Gabriel.
The medieval mentality that inspired it is also characterized by a profusion of symbols, but to comment on all of them would take us beyond the scope of this article. We will at least mention the manifest presence of the Blessed Trinity under different figures, and the remarkable timeless exegesis of replacing the “hortus conclusus” (Ct 4:12) – traditionally portrayed during the Gothic period as a garden surrounded by walls, symbolizing the most pure womb of the Virgin chosen to be the Mother of the Creator – with another garden, Eden, from which our first parents were expelled (cf. Gn 3:23).
This detail shows how the loss of Earthly Paradise because of original sin, a fact separated by millennia from the main theme of the work, constitutes a single scene in God’s atemporal eyes, the main “act” of the plot of history. That “felix culpa” which earned us so great a Redeemer – as the Easter Proclamation sings – made the Eternal One burst into time and become incarnate in the virginal cloister of Mary Most Holy, the new and unsurpassable Paradise of God and man (cf. Lk 1:26-38).
With the “exchange of Paradises”, this magnificent altarpiece announces the victory over sin, the triumph of God in history through the full union of the created with the divine.
Naturalist aesthetics and pragmatic reality
We find something very different in a not-so-well-known work of the humanist by definition: Leonardo da Vinci. In it we can appreciate highly developed technique, emphasized by excellent composition, using to great advantage the laws of geometric and atmospheric perspective, which the renowned genius of the Renaissance worked so hard to perfect.
Analysing the anatomy of the figures, as well as the fabrics, we see that in the pursuit of realism Da Vinci paid enormous attention to detail, which he achieved by employing the most refined effects offered by oil painting.
We are dealing with an artist who tried to unravel the secrets and foundations of nature, but who – in order to satisfy his pragmatic concerns, without wishing to go any further – implicitly renounced perceiving and transmitting the nectar of reality: the super-reality that lies in what we do not see and which, sustaining the visible, can only be appreciated by devout men who understand a language that is both theological and mystical (cf. Lk 10:21).
In the Renaissance master’s Annunciation, we see a maiden who is full of herself and not of grace, self-sufficient and complacent, who seems to be looking for a mysterious knowledge in her book that will be a source of prestige or power, and not something to feed her messianic hopes with humble admiration.
The sublime – as defined by Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira – has a degree of beauty whose proportion is superior to man and therefore is more demonstrative of God. And this is why an artist, if he chooses to set aside the theocentric message, regardless of technique or style, will become at best a “genius” of this world, oblivious to the call to be an interpreter of the sublime.
If some readers find these observations subjective, we invite them to sincerely answer the following question: would anyone, contemplating this painting, naturally feel inspired to pray or meditate with piety on the sacred mysteries?
Paradise of pleasures, divorced from Heaven
Anyone who closely analyses the mentality behind this and many other Renaissance works, such as the Annunciation by the paradigmatic Sandro Boticelli, will recognize that this period saw a rupture in the human spirit, foreshadowing the loss of faith in the Christian West.
Humanism advocated a tragic divorce between faith and reason, poetry and logic, spirit and matter. No longer concerned with uniting Heaven and earth, it sought to create in this world a paradise of pleasures that exalted physical beauty, relegating the supernatural to a secondary plane, removing the Cross of Christ from the centre and enthroning man, paving the way for the most sophistical worldliness and every form of disorder.
Even in sacred themes, which were gradually abandoned by the new pagans, the tendency of artists was to paint the scenes as the bodily senses perceive them in a merely empirical observation, discarding the imponderables that are discernible only by the spiritual senses and, at the same time, replacing devotion with drama and supernatural elevation with a superficial aesthetic. For this reason, we are led to recognize in the “naturalist fashion” of art the turning point at which the germ of Cartesianism is found, which in turn would lead to positivism and the sceptical materialism that reigns today.
Dr. Plinio1 explained that it is proper for the Catholic spirit to understand and unite harmonious opposites such as strength and delicacy, logic and fantasy;2 while it is proper to the Revolution, instead, to detest and oppose all equilibriums, and produce exaggerated manifestations of logic without fantasy – naturalism – and fantasy without logic – relativistic chaos.
This seemingly bold statement is better understood when we examine subsequent examples of that process of decadence which appears to have no end, capable of creating increasingly insolent extremes of ugliness, insanity and indecency.
Surreal and contentious delusions
The following images may offend the reader’s sensibilities because of the contrast they present. They are examples of celebrated modern painters, who have not yet reached the unpresentable extremes of certain more recent schools.
On the one hand, we have the giddy mockery of an eccentric, Salvador Dalí, the fruit of positivism, a doctrine that distorts man’s imagination. This power of the soul – which should be used to glimpse higher realities through exercises in metaphysical transcendence – is converted into a quagmire of nightmares and surreal delusions faithfully represented by this self-proclaimed “hallucinogen”3 in other of his world-famous paintings.
Abandoning the naturalism that still reigned in academic painting, as if by force of a pendulum, many “artists” like this one undertook to distort reality, with an increasingly subversive, revolutionary and contentious vision of life and the laws of traditional painting. It became commonplace to aim at disfigured and ghastly forms, which contrast with the balance, peace and serenity manifested by the art proper to centuries committed to the practice of virtue rather than the achievement of material success.
Thus, amid a multitude of avant-garde movements, the world witnessed how painters seemed to compete to most effectively shock, contradict and, if possible, reform the aesthetic order of the universe at will, with the general message being the confusing “annunciation” of a dark and chaotic future.
Relativism and irrationality
The consequence of the loss of faith is the dimming of the light of reason, which is why “intellectual” and “artistic” movements have emerged in modern times that even dare to question the existence of an absolute truth.
By separating the idea from the material object in art, they fell into the subjectivism of so-called “conceptual art”, in which only the supposed message is important, to be conveyed, for example by taping a banana to the wall of a museum – a work auctioned for more than six million dollars in November 2024 – or by displaying any other object, even the most repugnant, for visitors to contemplate.
On the other hand, there has been a proliferation of schools that, by banishing ideas, claim that it is the physical object that should be considered appreciable in itself, as a “natural” and passionate expression of the artist – without, of course, being bound by aesthetic rules.
The concept of art, brutally dissected, has lost its meaning as a technique or craft, let alone as a factor in cultural enhancement. The noble language of colours and forms – which served for centuries to convey messages of great transcendence, uplifting civilizations – has even been abolished in the name of “abstract expressionism”, in which ideas no longer matter: the only identifiable message is the justification of spontaneity and the irrational act dominated by the artist’s feelings.
The aim is no longer to present spiritual truths through beauty, but to create an impact on the bodily senses by transmitting a fleeting, subjective and futile emotion.
It is often said that, regardless of the subject chosen, the painter always portrays his own soul. In modern paintings, however, it seems that the means have replaced the end: the painter no longer strives to use his qualities to interpret his surroundings, but rather he uses his surroundings to proclaim his ego.
Jackson Pollock, the author of the work No. 5, 1948, confirms this in his own words: “Modern art, to me, is nothing more than the expression of the contemporary aims of the age we’re living in. […] All cultures have had means and techniques to express their immediate aims: the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.”4
With this in mind, it becomes easier to hypothesize about why this controversial painting was sold in 2006 for the incredible price of one hundred and forty million dollars… breaking the all-time record to that date for a return on a work of art.
It is really worth asking: what did the buyers see as so valuable in such a painting? Were they perhaps looking, as in the past, for a message reinforced by aesthetic satisfaction? Did they buy it out of mere snobbery or vulgar commercial speculation? Did they want a visual apology for an anarchic and egalitarian lifestyle? Were they fascinated the spirit that animated Pollock or simply looking for a faithful portrait of their own mentality?
More importantly, we have to ask ourselves if this art form, which in theory suppressed the ideological message, is no longer an annunciation but a confirmation of the chaos reigning in the minds and souls of those who embrace such a mode of “expression”. Is it not, in this sens, also a form of “annunciation”, albeit inverted?
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In view of all this, it is worth remembering that the way to recover wisdom lies in admiring every form of authentic pulchritude, especially the most beautiful and elevated of all, which is holiness, the annunciation of eternal happiness. ◊
Notes
1 Cf. CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Oração e holocausto simbolizados na lamparina [Prayer and Holocaust Symbolized in the Sancturay Lamp]. In: Dr. Plinio. São Paulo. Year XXVII. N.320 (Nov., 2024), p.33.
2 In the sense used by Dr. Plinio, the word fantasy does not refer to phantasmagoria or the illusory reverie of the mind, but to the creative capacity of the imagination.
3 “I’ve never taken drugs because I am the drug. Take me, I’m the drug, I’m the hallucinogenic,” said Dalí in an interview.
4 ROSS, Clifford (Ed.). Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. An Anthology. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p.140.
