Art Illumines Advent

When an artist’s mind holds faith as central, that faith finds itself reflected in the heart of art. For Luci Shaw and Fra Angelico, art ferments in the imagination as a sacramental wine.

In keeping with Advent, consider The Annunciation of Christ in Shaw’s poetry and Angelico’s painting.

Angelico, a Dominican friar in Florence, used art in service of his faith. Interestingly, this painter-monk, earned the nickname, “Angelic,” which endured through posterity.

Though Angelico reflects Gothic tradition, he played with Maccaccio’s revolutionary ideas about space and perspective and took new risks as he painted magnificent frescoes. And today, his work is catalogued with early Renaissance art well ahead of most artists of his period.

See Angelico’s The Annunciation (1420) below.

“It has been said that faith is ‘a certain widening of the imagination,’” Shaw mused in her Introduction of, Polishing the Petoskey Stone, a book of poetry. She added, “When Mary asked the Angel, ‘How shall these things be?’ she was asking God to widen her imagination.” Interestingly this is what Shaw does in her carefully selected words.

And, the quiet, calm of Shaw’s words leads us to consider the unexpected visit of the angel to Mary in “Announcement.”

Announcement

Yes, we have seen the studies, sepia strokes
across yellowed parchment, the fine detail
of hand and breast and the fall of cloth –
Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Titian, El Greco,
Roualt — each complex madonna positioned,
sketched, enlarged, each likeness plotted at last
on canvas, layered with pigment, like the final
draft of a poem ofter thirty-nine roughs.

But Mary, virgin, had no sittings, no chance
to pose her piety, no novitiate for body or
for heart. The moment was on her unaware:
The Angel in the room, the impossible demand,
the response without reflection. Only one
word of curiosity, echoing Zechariah’s How?
yet innocently voiced, without request for proof.
The teen head tilted in light, the hand
trembling a little at the throat, the candid
eyes, wide with acquiescence to shame and glory –
“Be it unto me as you have said.”

Luci Shaw, Polishing the Petoskey Stone, 1990.

For Shaw and Angelico, celebration of faith finds expression in well-crafted icons which illumine the Holy.