Guided Pathway

Nativity is announced, and the bearing is preceded, by the bearing of the news of pregnancy, of the message of the future accomplishment of an imminent event. From this proleptic perspective we might read #14 (Lot and his daughters fleeing from Sodom, which precedes and makes possible Lot lying with them and impregnating them – Genesis 19:30-38) and certainly #2 (a 7th cent. ivory bas-relief representing the Annunciation and the Visitation) and #19 (again the Visitation, in Ghirlandaio’s fresco located in the Tornabuoni chapel in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella).

In this context, even more eloquent than the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary (Luke 1:26-38) is the subsequent episode of the Visitation, i.e. the visit paid by the Virgin to her older cousin Elisabeth, pregnant of John the Baptist and already in her sixth month (Luke 1:39-56). Mary not only announces verbally her condition to Elisabeth, but also the two foetuses seem somehow to exchange the information, since “as soon as the voice of thy [i.e. Mary’s] salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy” (Luke 1:44).

The theme of message-transfer is variously evoked in the panel: from #3 (a bas-relief from a pulpit in the cathedral of Sessa Aurunca representing the Erythraean Sibyl, the prophetess of the Apollonian oracle at the Ionian town of Erythrae, who – according to the legend reported by Strabo, Geography 17.1.43 – had prophesied the divine parentage of Alexander the Great, thus the pagan typus of the antitypus Christ), to the angel (from the Greek angelos: messenger, envoy; a nuncio, from the Latin nuntius: messenger) Raphael helping Tobiah in #8.2 (an episode recounted in the Book of Tobit, picked up by Lucrezia Tornabuoni in her Istorie). Finally, from a morphological point of view, the two winged victories approaching the king’s throne in Agilulf’s helmet plate (#1) constitute a classical counterpart to the winged Christian angels.