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Disciplines

Aesthetics | Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Theory and Criticism

Abstract

The Annunciation is often thematized in the critical literature and foremost among these thematizations, recently to be sure, are feminist readings, which matter for this essay although this essay can only refer to these in passing.

The focal concern is personal correspondence and intimate address or intrigue. This essay thus offers a hermeneutic reading less of the presumptive purity of our perception of this painting, as indeed of its reception, involving a distinction to be noted between male and female subjects than it reviews a recollection of the divine inclination to beauty in both pagan, Greek, and Judaeo- Christian traditions. Adverting thus to the parabolic as to the salvific (and to the question of Redemption by means of faith -- the word only), the essay concludes by noting the terror of angels and being, in the image of, like unto, God.

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