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Category: learn to paint

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Culture of Excess

Butcher’s Stall with the Flight into Egypt, 1551,Pieter Aertsen
My friend Dan Gowing was writing his Sunday school lesson this week when he realized just how efficient Jesus was with the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. The Gospel of Mark records that there were twelve baskets left after feeding 5,000 men and their families. Dan’s conclusion is that you can’t actually get anything you want from Jesus’ restaurant but you just might find you get what you need.
My holiday motto generally is, “What’s worth doing is worth doing to excess.” In that I am a typical American. Our Thanksgiving dinner alone usually has about twelve baskets of leftovers.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Rudolf II as Vertumnus, 1590, takes “you are what you eat” to its ultimate level. It’s not mere whimsy, but symbolizes “the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the ruling family over everything.” (Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann) He’s not Dutch, but he sure is good.

In November, I postedabout Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want and how its table is almost bare by modern standards. When Rockwell painted this a mere 70 years ago our self-identity was still Puritan. Today we wallow in outsized appetites, and we’re all pretty fat. In fact, we’re far more like the Dutch Golden Age than our own recent ancestors. Of course, back then the Dutch were rich like us.
On the other hand, most of us miss the point of those Dutch paintings entirely. If we see them just as a celebration of bounty or a cock’s crow of vanity, we’re missing the warning sign buried in them.
Shop, with the Flight into Egypt, top, is in fact an allegory. The Holy Family, inset in a window frame, distributes alms to the poor as they leave. A merry group is seen eating shellfish (a symbol of lust) through the other window. The sign at the top tells you that the land is for sale, leading you to understand that all of this is available at a moral price.
Still life, 1644, Adriaen van Utrecht. This canvas includes almost all the elements common to great Dutch still lives. The presence of so much exotica points to the great wealth of the Dutch Republic. However, within this epic are buried memento mori:  the seashell represents human frailty; the spotted fruit, our own aging and decay; the music, the brevity of life. Like life, the peeled lemon is pretty to look at but bitter to taste.

Several cultural forces in the Dutch Republic led to their love of still life. The rise in interest in natural science in the 16th century supported a concurrent rise in realism in painting (trompe l’oeil being the highest expression of this). By the 17th century, the Dutch Republic dominated world trade and had a vast colonial empire. They operated the largest fleet of merchant ships in the world.
But while they were rich and famously religiously tolerant, they were also strictly Calvinist. Icons were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church. Painters were forced to deal with religious subjects through symbolism. Their vanitaspaintings point out the transience of our earthly pleasures.
Flowers in a Silver Vase, 1663, by Willem van Aelst, includes a pocketwatch (time), poppies (death), roses (Christian faith), tulips (folly), dragonfly (transience), and butterfly (resurrection).
This was particularly easy with flowers. A language of flower symbolism had developed through the Middle Ages. These were both positive (such as the rose and lily representing love in both its divine and human manifestation) and negative (the poppy representing death). 
The presence of symbols of impermanence, such as candles, hourglasses, a book with pages turning, or buzzing flies, reminded the viewer that sensory pleasures are ephemeral.
The modern equivalent, of course, is the food photograph. Its similarity is in the excess, but it lacks self-awareness.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Crazy artists

Pietà, (1498-99) Michelangelo. There’s been speculation that Michelangelo was somewhere on the autism spectrum. His hygiene was abysmal, he didn’t like talking to others, and he was monomaniacally focused on his work. And yet he exerted an unparalleled influence on western thinking, as a sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer.

I meet myself in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with tiresome regularity. The creative personality (and I’m no exception) is frequently impulsive, non-conformist, and motivated by what less-enlightened minds might call fantasy.
In the past, people actually understood that as a thinking pattern. Today, we define impulsivity and fantastical thinking as personality disorders. No child with this personality type will be allowed through school without being subjected to a program of therapy and drugs to ‘normalize’ him or her.
The Yellow Christ, 1889, Paul Gauguin.  Despite his success, Gauguin was certainly crazy by our standards, suffering from depression and alcoholism until he abandoned civilization for Tahiti, where he spent the last few years of his life painting in peace.
An exasperated educator once told my husband and me that they needed to prepare our kids for the “real world.” What does an educator know about reality? He works in a highly-regimented environment whose goals are not the goals of the larger world.
At the time, my husband was telecommuting with a Boston software start-up; I paint full time. Our “normal” wasn’t even in most people’s viewfinder. We didn’t have a typical life, but we certainly had a self-sufficient, productive and respectable one.
St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1595-1596, Caravaggio. Psychoanalyzing Caravaggio is a popular activity now, but there’s no doubt that even his contemporaries found him unsettling. The model for this painting was Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several works by Caravaggio. He tried to castrate her pimp, Tomassoni, and struck his femoral artery instead, killing him. Among the bully boys of 16th century Rome, if a man insulted another man’s woman, the penalty was castration. It was an age of brawling, and any attempt to interpret it by our social code is bound to fail.
Our schools can’t cope with the creative kid who doesn’t fit into any mold. In the past, that child might have gone on to be a Bill Gates, Rachael Ray, or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA), but in the modern world, most avenues are closed to people without education.
Then there’s the question of what happens when something goes wrong. As a society, we have a knack for pathologizing absolutely normal human responses.
I have the personality of a terrier. I bite first and ask questions later; however, as with my dog, my instincts are usually spot-on. Like a watchdog, when things go wrong, I stay awake. Both times I have been sick, my first response was insomnia. That is commonly treated with antidepressants. I fell for that the first time, with awful results. This time, I’m recognizing my insomnia for what it is—a normal psychological reaction—and just enduring it.
Our ancestors used to formally identify the emotionally-bruised and set them apart so they didn’t have to experience the full thrust of human interaction. Nobody expected you to behave normally when you were traumatized, which in part obviated the need for antidepressants. Today we don’t even wear black to funerals; to wear it for a year after a loss is unthinkable. Yet, when one in ten Americans are taking antidepressants, one might conclude that unrecognized and unprocessed grief comes back to bite us.
Cats by Louis Wain. He spent time in an asylum, but his artistic skills never diminished. That indicates that whatever was going on, he wasn’t schizophrenic. Today he wouldn’t be considered mentally ill; he would be a star on social media, with its outsized interest in cats.
Similarly, there is a lot to make us anxious in the modern world. Every adolescent I’ve ever known has in some degree suffered from an anxiety disorder, because the natural state of the adolescent is anxiety. Much of this is emotional noise and just needs to be waited out. It’s helpful to point that out to a kid; it’s not as helpful to tell him that he’s fundamentally flawed and can only function with drugs.
More seriously, post-traumatic stress disorder is what happens when a healthy human mind is traumatized. How, then, is it an illness? Is it not in fact a normal response to an intolerable situation? If so, does it not make sense that the human mind also has an answer to it in its own depths? How useful is it to tell its sufferers that they’re somehow irretrievably broken, especially since there’s no good comprehensive treatment for PTSD?
In the past—ironically enough—the deeply traumatized individual might have been guided to write or paint or otherwise express his or her fears through creative expression. Too bad that we now want to just wipe that out with drugs.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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America’s favorite folk art form

Nativity crèche at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Rochester, NY. This follows the German custom of not placing the Christ Child in place until Christmas. I confess to secretly plotting for years with my friend Judie to steal this and resurrect it on our Town Triangle on a Friday night, in the belief that nobody could call to complain until after sundown on Saturday. But my respect for the crèche’s creator, Al Bullwinkle, always stays my hand.
Every November the United States schedules a ruckus over removing religious symbols from our public spaces. Despite that, the Nativity crèche remains our favorite folk art form, at least now that those plywood cutouts of gardener’s butts are passé.
St. Francis instituting the crèche at Greccio, painted by Giotto sometime around 1300.
St. Francis of Assisi is generally credited with creating the first Nativity scene. It was 1223, and he was attempting to center Christmas on the worship of Christ rather than on materialism and gift giving. It was a Living Nativity, and he staged it in a cave. Not only did he not make much headway against crass commercialism, the next year the Church recorded the first fight over who got to play the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Metropolitan Museum has a magnificent 18th century Neapolitan crèche set, which changes every year as they add new pieces.
The first sculpted Italian terra cotta Nativity sets were created shortly after that, probably because they couldn’t talk back. As crèches were scaled down to fit in homes, their construction shifted to include wood, wax, and plaster. Like other icons, many were forms of tow and wire with beautifully-sculpted faces and hands, dressed in lovely silk clothing. The custom reached its zenith in 18th century Naples. The Metropolitan Museum has an outstanding collection of these crèche figures.
Today there are plastic Fontanini sets from Italy, plaster crèches from Bavaria, KrakĂłw szopka from Poland, carved-wood sets from South America, paper nativities—in short the crèche tradition has as many variations as the world has cultures.  Nobody loves them more than Americans, where we translate the Holy Family into Peanuts™ characters and turn nativity sets into collectibles that we then bid up into dazzling prices in our other art form, the marketplace.
Polish nativity set, or KrakĂłw szopka. I have a beautiful polychrome nativity set, one made of pressed clay by my kids, and a mismatched plaster set made by my sister and brother and me in Sunday school almost fifty years ago. All are equally precious to me.
I live in a place whose town triangle in December is graced not by a crèche, but by a sewer-pipe menorah. Nativity crèches have great currency even here. I get great joy from peeking at them through lighted windows this time of year.
The blessings of the season be with you!

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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It is what it is…

Cartoon for an oil painting of Dr. Bernard Plansky removing my surgical staples.

By the time you read this, I will be snoring softly under a general anesthetic while the very gifted Dr. Eugene P. Toy takes a sharp knife to my innards.

This is my sixth surgery in fourteen years. If a stranger told me that, I’d think either he was suffering from MĂźnchausen syndrome or had had so much plastic surgery that he ought to look as good as Michael Jackson.  But neither is true here. Nor am I particularly worried. This is a horrible clanger in my schedule, but I’m confident that I’m in God’s hands.

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go. That includes not just nail polish, but greyscale markers, drawing paper, and a sketchbook. And my list of paintings.
I did the above cartoon after a memorable day with our family doctor, Dr. Bernard Plansky, in 2000. (He’s the guy responsible for catching my first cancer after an internist and gastroenterologist missed it; if you object to my presence here, take it up with him.) Rather than drive back to Roswell Park to have my staples removed, I asked him to do it.

He had a resident with him whose job was basically to hold my hand to stop me from whining. Dr. Plansky asked if the resident could pull a few staples for the experience. I’m all for apprenticeship, so of course I said yes. But my deal was that I got to remove one myself. The great blessing of my life is that even the darkest times end up being a little absurd, and thus filled with laughter.

I  made canvases for my spring show before my hospitalization. That’s nine large linen canvases in the back, and bunch of sketch boards in the front. They’ll be totally dry by the time I get home. I plan just to draw in hospital, but if they don’t spring me fast enough, I’ll bring in contraband art supplies.
I never painted this self-portrait, but I still like the idea. However, it has to wait until I’m done with my current project. To that end, I’ve made nine beautiful big linen canvases. I’ve toned them and my sketch boards. They’ll be thoroughly dry when I get home. I’ve packed my sketchbook and my greyscale markers. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Magi

The Adoration of the Magi (tapestry), 1904, by Edward Burne-Jones. Note the angel leading the magi with the Star of Bethlehem cupped in his hands.
My father occasionally talked about the last time he saw his father. He said he was a very small boy, and there had been a blizzard on St. Patrick’s Day, and he and his mother saw his father briefly on the street.
After he was long dead, I realized he was talking about the Great St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard of 1936, when he was, in fact, 12 years old. That time compression, in an odd way, lends verisimilitude to his tale. We can all understand a fatherless boy conflating the two most memorable events of his young childhood. There is nothing rehearsed or too perfect about that: it sings from the heart.
Adoration of the Magi, 1504, Albrecht DĂźrer. The Bible doesn’t specify that there were Three Wise Men; it doesn’t say one was black; it doesn’t name them Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior. 
The visit of the Magi to the infant Christ child has a star hanging over it: the Star of Bethlehem. The identity of this star has interested scientists for as long as we have studied the heavens. It may have been the conjunction of planets or stars, it may have been Halley’s Comet, which showed up in 12 BC. It may have been another comet detected in the Far East around 5 BC.

Dream of Three Wise Men. Capital from Autun cathedral, mid-12th century, Ghiselbertus of Autun.
The trouble is that none of these events line up perfectly enough to satisfy an image of the Magi worshipping the newborn Christ in the manger. (Of course, the story doesn’t say he was a newborn, either.) The slight misalignment between the Gospel story and what science currently says gives it the ring of truth.

Detail from Mary and Child, surrounded by angels, 526 AD, Master of Sant’Apollinare, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy.
We translate “magi” as “wise men” but they were probably actually astrologers: men who studied the influence of the heavenly spheres on the lives of mere mortals. That’s a discipline we completely discount today, but who better to follow a star to the Living God?
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Shepherds

The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Chinese. 20th century, Unknown Artist (and that’s a pity, because it’s a wonderful painting).

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

The Annunciation to the Shepherds, 1663, Abraham Hondius. This is exactly what I see in my mind’s eye, including the fat little putti.
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
Annunciation to the Shepherds, first half of 17th century, Juan Dò. Until recently, this painting was unattributed, which is oddly appropriate, considering it’s a portrait of the lowest of the low.
Because of the time compression of the Bible, we get the impression that angels regularly zipped down to earth. I’m no theologian, but that doesn’t seem to be strictly true. There are a lot of visitations of angels in the early times recorded in Genesis—to Adam and Eve, to Hagar, to Sarah and Abraham, to Lot, to Jacob. Perhaps the most charming story of angels appears in Numbers, when Balaam is being such a jerk that the angel works through his donkey instead.
The visitations by angels in the Old Testament happened over thousands of years. On the other hand, during the brief period in which Jesus and his disciples lived, angels seemed awfully active. Angels were with Jesus at his birth, at his temptation in the desert, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the tomb was empty, and at his ascension to heaven. Likewise, an angel appeared to Peter when in prison.
The Annunciation to the Shepherds, 1875, Jules Bastien-Lepage, who is most famous for his brilliant Jeanne d’Arc at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mary, of course, received a visit from the angel Gabriel, and Joseph was spoken to by an angel. But those darn shepherds; now, that’s a weird story. If Joseph and Mary were nobodies in the Roman Empire, those shepherds were lower than dirt. And yet Caesar Augustus sat alone in his palace and a whole choir of angels came down to talk to the shepherds in Bethlehem instead.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Mystical Nativity

The Nativity, 1912, Sir Stanley Spencer. Joseph is off to the right, doing something to the chestnut tree.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Raphael, Rubens, Tiepolo, Correggio, and the other great painters who’ve painted exquisite Nativities. But there is something arresting about the mystical nativity, where reality is somehow subsumed in spiritual fervor.
Sir Stanley Spencer painted the Nativity, top, as a student at Slade in 1912. He later explained:
The couple occupy the centre of the picture, Joseph who is to the extreme right doing something to the chestnut tree and Mary who stands by the manger…  Joseph is only related to Mary in this picture by some sacramental ordinance… This relationship has always interested me and in those early works I contemplated a lot of those unbearable relationships between men and women.  
The embracing couple represents physical love in contrast to Mary and Joseph’s spiritual connection. That goes with Spencer’s amazingly messed-up attitudes toward women and sex. Spencer’s strict separation between the spiritual and the physical is the neo-Platonic trap into which many of the mystic painters fall. The whole point of the Incarnation is that God becomes man, sharing our joys, sorrows, and, yes, the messy realities of our births and deaths.
 

Nativity, 1310, Giotto. Joseph seems to be sleeping.

Giotto is generally considered the first Renaissance painter, but he was firmly in touch with his medieval self. That gave him a leg up for mysticism. The pre-Renaissance world was able to see in a non-literal way that is almost completely lost to us. This allows the infant John the Baptist to sit at the bottom of the frame while Jesus is being born, and the almost-disembodied angels that arch across the top of the painting like a Byzantine architrave.
 

The Nativity, 1492, Domenico Ghirlandaio. You have to zoom in to see her laser-beam prayer. What is it with poor Joseph? Asleep again.

Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Virgin Mary sending laser beams of prayer down to the infant Jesus while a heavenly choir sings above. The columns and one-point perspective point us that much farther along the Renaissance.  All that gold leaf you’re seeing in the Italian paintings of this time is supposed to remind you of the untarnished nature of the story.
 

The Mystical Nativity, 1500-01, Sandro Botticelli. Believe it or not, Joseph is sleeping.

Sandro Botticelli described the Nativity as the moment when heaven and earth touch. He was painting at the apogee of the Italian Renaissance, which accounts for the more concrete nature of his visionary angels—he couldn’t throttle back on the realism like Giotto or Ghirlandaio . In his later years, Botticelli fell under the influence of a fanatical Florentine preacher, Savonarola. There is something almost manic in the earthly action in this painting that points to the spiritual oppression of the time.
The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, 1434-36, Jan van Eyck. Joseph doesn’t even show up for this one.
By the fifteenth century, the idea of the Virgin Mary as intercessor for the sinful had gained traction. Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna with Canon van der Paele shows the donor beseeching the Virgin Mary and Sts. Donatian and George. The intense realism and the fine architectural drawing contrast with the unreality of these four figures sharing a common space.
The Nativity, c. 1810, William Blake. At least Joseph is actually present.
William Blake painted the above panel, on copper, concurrently with his Europe, a Prophecy, from which comes his wonderful Ancient of Days painting. At about the same time, he also painted a series of watercolors illustrating Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”:
It was the winter wild,
While the Heav’n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies…
But Blake, as usual, strayed off into his neo-Platonic world-view. Here the soul of Jesus leaps fully formed toward the soul of John the Baptist. No encumbrances such as the messy reality of childbirth or our imprisonment in our fleshly bodies gets in the way.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Census at Bethlehem

The Census at Bethlehem, 1566, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. If this looks a little cold even for December in Antwerp, bear in mind that he was painting at the beginning of the Little Ice Age.
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child…” (Luke 2:1-5)

The ruined castle in the far distance of Bruegel’s painting was based on the towers and gates of Amsterdam. 
The Jewish writer Titus Flavius Josephus recorded that Quirinius (Cyrenius), Legate of Syria, and Coponius, Prefect of Iudaea, were assigned to do a tax census of their respective provinces for the Empire in 6-7 CE:
Now Cyrenius, a Roman senator, and one who had gone through other magistracies, and had passed through them till he had been consul, and one who, on other accounts, was of great dignity, came at this time into Syria, with a few others, being sent by Caesar to be a judge of that nation, and to take an account of their substance. Coponius also, a man of the equestrian order, was sent together with him, to have the supreme power over the Jews. Moreover, Cyrenius came himself into Judea, which was now added to the province of Syria, to take an account of their substance, and to dispose of Archelaus’s money…

Chaos at the government office… the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the Roman Empire, the natives were frequently revolting. Censuses—with the inevitable taxes that followed—caused rebellion from Gaul to Pannonia to Cappadocia. In Judea one Judas of Galilee led a violent resistance. His group, which Josephus labelled “The Zealots,” preached that God alone was the leader of Israel and urged a tax rebellion against Rome.
Citizen and provincial censuses were conducted differently, but that sacrificial bull at the right in the Census Frieze from Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (2nd century BC) might give some clue as to why the Jews found the practice so annoying.
In 2 Samuel 24, the young King David decided to take a census of his people over the objection of his general, Joab. God was clearly angered by this, but why? The answer may lie in David’s need to number his own strength instead of relying on God. However, a census is often a tool of a totalitarian government, as was certainly true with the Romans.
Bruegel painted the actors as his friends and contemporaries, underscoring the universality of the story. But to us, the Flemish Renaissance peasant seems as strange and marvelous as would Biblical-era Bethlehem.
The genealogies in Luke and Matthew are meant to spell out the Jesus’ legitimacy for the throne of David on both sides of his family. That is reinforced in the passage above, which also brings us (and the Holy Family) back to Micah 5:
But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
    though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
    one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
    from ancient times.
Bruegel hid the main actors in his play in plain sight. Now that I’ve shown you the Holy Family, you can find them in the painting.
When it comes to artistic representations of the Holy Family’s arrival at Bethlehem, one painting stands above all others: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem, 1566. As always, Bruegel hid the main figures of the play in plain sight. He subsumed them in the greater action of life, neatly reflecting that the drama at Bethlehem concerned an unknown family at the farthest outposts of the Empire. The players were not exotic; they were the faces of his friends and neighbors.

Arrival of the Holy Family in Bethlehem, 1543, Cornelis Massijs. Same schtick, totally different outcome.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Annunciation to Joseph

The Dream of St. Joseph by Georges de La Tour.
Most of us aren’t even aware that there was an Annunciation to Joseph. The Merode altarpiece, below, pretty much reflects our impression: we’re there (in the guise of the donors) listening as the Angel Gabriel drops his world-changing news, while Joseph whittles obliviously off to one side.

The MĂŠrode Altarpiece, by Robert Campin and assistant, 1425-28, shows Joseph’s usual place in our thinking about the Assumption; he’s off to one side, whittling.
Had the Angel of the Lord not spoken to Joseph, there would be no Christmas story. Mary would have been (quite legitimately) abandoned by him and quietly exiled, stoned, or worse. But few artists bothered painting his side of the story.
I posted my own painting of the subject recently; I imagined it was as if a bomb had gone off in Joseph’s life. Historically, those few artists who bothered followed the Bible account more closely and painted him sleeping.
Joseph’s Dream, c.1790 by Gaetano Gandolfi could betaken as an Annunciation of the Virgin Birth. However, the angel is pointing toward the wilderness and Joseph has a staff. That probably means he’s about to become a travelin’ man, as in the Flight to Egypt.
Any idea that he was significantly older than Mary is a myth, similar to the Penitent Magdalene (and equally suspicious as to motive). But that is what the church taught, so that is what artists frequently painted. No surprise, then, that they actually preferred painting Mary, who was presumably younger and prettier and fully awake when Gabriel stopped by.
The Dream of Saint Joseph, 1642-43, by Philippe de Champaigne. I hesitate to pass judgment on paintings, but that dangling angel actually makes me wince. I’m almost certain Mary feels the same way.
The Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph bearing three different messages (in Matthew 1:20-21, Matthew 2:13, and Matthew 2:19-20). Each time, his vision was in the form of a dream; two of these dreams relate to the Flight into Egypt. Is there some confluence between the dreams of this Joseph and the dreams of his namesake, who rose to be Vizier of Egypt after being sold into slavery by his brothers?
Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin isn’t an Annunciation, but it does show Joseph acting on his dream. Raphael painted this in 1504. Perugino painted almost the exact same painting in 1503 or 1504. One of those dudes owes the other an apology.
Georges de La Tour was almost alone in projecting serious thought onto the subject of Joseph’s first vision. His Joseph has fallen asleep while reading Scripture (which ties him to the standard iconography of Mary). A childlike angel gently touches his arm.
De La Tour used candles to describe his subjects’ souls; although we can’t see the flame itself, this one is elongated and smoking, implying that the wick is overlong. That, combined with the shadow of the scissors on the table, tell us that de La Tour was painting an old man at the end of his days. (It has been proposed that this might in fact be a painting of the Infant Samuel waking the priest Eli. It works charmingly either way.)

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Six Days of Advent: The Annunciation to Mary

The Annunciation Triptych, 1440, by Rogier van der Weyden, has the compressed version from the Gospel of Luke, almost in comic-book form—Zecheriah praying in his lonely temple, Gabriel surprising Mary while she reads Scripture, Mary meeting with Elizabeth, in whose womb the young John the Baptist leaps in recognition.
The story of the Incarnation opens not with the Angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, but with his appearance to an old temple priest. Zechariah reacted with all-too-human skepticism to the idea that his post-menopausal wife would give birth to a son who “will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah.” 
Virgin of the Annunciation, 1512, by Matthias GrĂźnewald, also shows Mary at her studies, but clothed in the most exuberant pleats, which reinforce the ecstatic nature of the moment.
A few months later, Gabriel returned to Israel, this time to Nazareth in Galilee, to talk to a young woman who was engaged to be married.
In contrast, Antonello da Messina’s Virgin Annunciate, 1476, is taking the news with remarkable composure.
 â€œDo not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

The angel Gabriel in Sondro Botticelli’s 1481 fresco seems to be leaning over an imaginary wall for a friendly chat.
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”
 â€œI am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” (from Luke 1:26-38)

In Hendrick Terbrugghen’s 1624 Annunciation, Gabriel has dirty feet.
Mary understood that being pregnant by someone other than her betrothed threatened her engagement, her reputation, and even her life (as she could be stoned for adultery). The early Renaissance painters would have understood her predicament better than we, for whom illegitimacy is no big deal.  If the Baby Jesus were conceived today, sadly, nobody would much notice.
Albrecht Durer’s Annunciation from The Life of the Virgin, 1502, sets the scene in an amazing series of arches that suggest the very heavens themselves.

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