Label Text:
Marginal Latin inscription: Ecce sacer celsa volucer descendit ab arce / Et gerit aterni nuntia verba Patris / Ipse gerit nostram portantia verba salutem / Virginecque subit tecta verenda domus. / Est Pater, est in te Divinia potentia nati / Inque tua santus Spiritus arce sedet / Ecce viri nullo paries de sanguine procem / Quae suet antiqui crimina prima Patris.
"Look, the noble sacred bird comes down from the fortress and carries in announcement the words of the eternal Father. He Himself carried the word that brings our salvation and enters the venerable walls of the house of Mary. In you, Father, in you is the divine power of your Son and in your fortress dwells the Holy Spirit. Look to no man you will generate a prince by blood who will fasten together the early crimes of the ancient Father."
A youthful Goltzius produced this reproductive engraving after a design by the sixteenth-century artist Marten de Vos for the Antwerp publishing house Aux Quatre Vents. A similar painting by De Vos survives, although the drawing that likely served as the print’s model does not. Presuming that Goltzius was given liberty to revise his source, he reversed the painting’s overall composition but varied the figures so that their right and left hands remain consistent: Gabriel, for example, enters from the right in the painting and the left in the print, but in both he gestures heavenward with his right hand and holds a lily – the symbol of the Virgin -- with his left. Goltzius could have reproduced the painting in the same orientation, but reversing it with altered elements allowed him to imbue the scene with a greater vitality, especially in the twisting body of the Virgin. Unlike the prints in his later Life of the Virgin series, Goltzius here engraves in keeping with the more typical northern sixteenth-century iconography and style, with its swirling drapery in multiple folds, authoritative and swooping Gabriel, rounded facial types, and even, close hatching.
(Susan Anderson, Ph.D., interim Mellon Coordinator of College Programs, 2009)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1973.73 |
