READING THE ANNUNCIATION

This essay explores Mieke Bal's mode of reading pictures through an analysis of several Annunciation paintings. Annunciation paintings have often posed a stumbling block to arthistorical interpretation. Supported by Bal's method of visual analysis, the author suggests that the problem of interpreting the Annunciation results in part from iconography's insufficiency, as well as its sexually repressed subject matter, as well as from their embedding in the formal apparatus of perspective. Grootenboer contends that the problem of the Annunciation lies in the mystery of the Incarnation as much as in perspective's presumed innocence as a transparent method for rendering the mystery visible. The author's aim is to demonstrate the complicity between perspective, also called construzione legittima, and the theme of the Annunciation has eventually legitimized an infinite unravelling of the secret.