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Male: One of the great masters of the 14th century
was Simone Martini and the Annunciation
is his most famous painting.
Female: This is the moment when the angel, Gabriel,
has come to announce to Mary
that she will conceive the Christ child.
Male: That announcement is literally taking place.
Female: We can see the angel's announcemnet
to Mary quite literally coming out of his mouth,
left to right.
Male: As if is it was a speech bubble.
Female: In Latin, "Hail, Mary, full of grace,
"blessed art thou among women."
Male: It is the most elegant and beautiful painting.
It makes so much sense that this was
a student of Duccio in the Sienese style.
We see that kind of attention to decorative pattern
and detail and subtle color and a kind of elegance.
Look, for example, at Gabriel's wings
and the fluidity and delicacy there,
or especially of the drape that whips around
as if he's just landed.
Female: It's really like the artist is just
enjoying those beautiful sinuous lines,
which I think of as also very characteristic
of the Sienese style.
In the middle of this very shallow space
that Simone Martini has created, we see a vase
with lilies, which are symbols of Mary's virginity.
We do have a bit of a space here,
but we still have that large gold expanse
behind the figures
and Mary, who's very thin and elongated.
Male: In addition to the vase of lilies,
which is a standard symbol in the Annunciation,
we see Gabriel holding a branch of olive leaves,
which is a symbol of Christ,
of the coming of the Prince of Peace.
And, of course, an olive branch
is a traditional symbol that refers back
to the story of Noah and the dove
returning with an olive branch, speaking
of the kind of covenant of peace with God.
Female: We also see in the triangular space
above and between Mary and the angel Gabriel,
the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove
surrounded by seraphim, by angels,
and rays of golden light that emerge
from that haloed dove and move toward Mary.
Male: They actually emerge from the beak,
which is open, of the dove
as if the Holy Spirit is speaking
this grace, speaking this divinity.
It echoes, of course, the fact that Gabriel
the archangel, is also speaking to Mary.
Female: Mary is turning away.
If you look at it, the line from the dove to Mary
and from the angel's words to Mary
form two sides of a triangle that meet at Mary,
and that she, with her body and her face,
kind of pulls away from being
the center of this attention.
Male: So this is modesty that is represented;
that Mary is a slightly unwilling vessel for God.
She's been interrupted.
You can see her fingers still holding a place
in the Bible which she has been piously reading
as Gabriel so evidently has just arrived.
Female: We have a kind of sense of time
unfolding here, that Mary is about to,
but has not yet said,
"Behold the handmaiden of the Lord."
She hasn't yet accepted her destiny
as the mother of God.
Male: This is a really interesting issue then,
because there is the momentary.
But at the same time,
the artist is creating a perfect moment
that is absolute and eternal.
How do you imbue a painting both with
the full dignity and grace of the spiritual moment
and at the same moment speak to that human experience?
Female: I think it was very important to be able
to imagine what this moment was like.
The sense that it has of the momentary
and Mary's emotional reaction
helps us to imagine what this moment
must have felt like for her.
Male: A couple cautions about this painting.
The frame, which is wildly elaborate, is not original.
In fact, it's a 19th century.
That is it's a much more modern
representation of the kind of frame
that might have originally been around it,
but I don't think we know what that was.
In addition, the two saints that flank
the main panel would probably not have been
immediately adjacent to it.
So just a couple of cautions in terms
of how this painting has changed over time.
Female: Always a good thing to remember
when you're in a museum looking
at works of art that are 800 years old.
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