The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Simone Martini · tempera and gold on panel · an altarpiece scored as one work: the Annunciation under a triple arch, the dove in a ring of angels at its apex, Saint Ansanus in a narrow field at the left and a female saint, traditionally named Margaret, at the right, four prophets in roundels above · signed with Lippo Memmi, 1333 · painted for the altar of Saint Ansanus in Siena Cathedral; Uffizi, Florence
Mode
Altarpiece of a sacred narrative; the Annunciation read as a moment of alarm, inside a civic polyptych of patron saints
Mythos
The messenger from above, the chosen virgin, the word that becomes flesh; conception through hearing given visible matter
Phase
The instant of the greeting: the angel still in flight, the woman interrupted at her reading, consent not yet given
Presentation
Tempera and gold leaf on panel, the whole ground gilded, tooled and punched; the words raised in gesso and gilded; ultramarine against gold
Register
Grace and awe together, a beauty with fear inside it; at the sides, the calm of two upright saints
Scale
Two figures and a vase in the centre, two saints at the sides, four prophets above, one altar of one cathedral
Governing Proposition
An angel has come down and not yet finished arriving: he kneels at the left with his mantle still lifting behind him, an olive branch in his hand, and the words of his greeting run from his mouth across the gold toward a young woman who turns away on her throne, her mantle drawn to her throat and her thumb kept in her book. Between them stands a vase of lilies, and above them the dove descends in a ring of angels. The wager of the panel is that the oldest scene of the sacred addressing a person can be carried by line and gold alone, without room, air or weight, and that the empty gold between the messenger and the woman can be made to hold what the scene is about: the alarm that comes before consent.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The panel was painted for an altar in Siena Cathedral: the altar of Saint Ansanus, one of the side altars dedicated to the city’s patron saints. It is dated 1333 and signed with two names, Simone Martini’s and that of his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi; an inscription on the frame names both painters and the year. It is tempera and gold on panel. It left Siena for Florence and has hung for a long time in the Uffizi, where it is among the best known paintings of its century.
The work scored is the altarpiece as it now stands, as one work. At the centre, under a triple arch, is the Annunciation. In a narrow field at the left stands Saint Ansanus, Siena’s patron; in a narrow field at the right stands a female saint traditionally named Margaret, though the identification is not settled and she is sometimes given as Saint Massima. Above, in the gables, four half-length prophets look out of roundels. The whole field is gold leaf, tooled and punched, and at the apex of the central arch the dove of the Holy Spirit descends in a ring of winged angels.
The central scene is generally given to Simone, and the saints at the sides, Ansanus at least, and the roundels are commonly given to Memmi. The division is a question of the record, and the work is not divided by it: everything made for this altar is credited or charged to the altarpiece, not to either hand. Where the second hand shows, in the stiffer saints and their drapery, the work is charged for it, and where the centre rises, the work is credited.
Movement II
Gabriel kneels at the left. He has not quite finished arriving: his mantle, a patterned cloth, still flies out behind him as if the flight were in progress, his wings are barred in gold and colour, his robe is gold brocade. He wears a crown of olive and holds an olive branch where the tradition put a lily. From his mouth the words of his greeting run across the gold toward the Virgin’s face: “AVE GRATIA PLENA DOMINUS TECUM”, the salutation of Luke 1:28 in the Vulgate. They are not painted on the gold. They are raised from it in gesso and gilded, so that they catch the light as the viewer moves.
This is the picture’s first decision and its deepest. A word spoken to a person is a thing that crosses space and arrives, and here it is literally made of the same gold as heaven. The ground behind the figures is not air; there is no room, no horizon, nothing to stand in. The figures stand out of a field of light like inlay, and the words belong to that field, part of the ground they cross. The old figure of conception through hearing, the word entering at the ear, is given visible matter: the greeting passing from mouth to ear as gold is the conception itself.
No other medium could carry this in this way. In oil or fresco the words would be an inscription laid over a scene; here they are built of the same stuff as the ground and the haloes. The goldsmith’s work of the panel, its tooled haloes, punched borders and brocade, is not ornament around the subject but the means by which the subject is made. The making is load-bearing, and it is the strongest thing in the work.
Movement III
The Virgin sits at the right on a throne, and she turns away. Her body twists back from the angel; her face is drawn down and wary; her hand pulls her blue mantle to her throat; and her other hand keeps her place in the book she was reading, the thumb still between the pages. She has pulled to the right edge of her throne. Her contour, from shoulder to hem, is a single shrinking line, deep blue against the gold, and it is among the great lines in painting.
Luke says she was troubled at the greeting, and the tradition of the Byzantine and Duccesque Annunciation had passed over that trouble, showing her calm, frontal and accepting. Here the trouble is made the subject. What the panel discloses can be stated: the coming of the divine into a life is first an alarm, and holiness disturbs before it consoles. Consent is not given in this instant. It lies ahead, outside the picture, and the picture makes the gap between address and answer visible as a distance of gold.
That distance is the use of the panel’s width. The central field is wide, and the two figures are set at its ends, with the empty gold between them as the hesitation. Whether the Virgin’s start is fear, modesty or the first of an ordered sequence of responses to the angel remains an open question of the picture. What it is not is an illustration: a text already given is read with unusual candour into a body. The disclosure is one moment of that text, and the panel holds it at the bar, not above it.
Movement IV
Between the two figures, at the exact hinge of the composition, stands a vase of lilies. It is set where the meeting does not yet happen: purity planted in the gap. The lily has moved from the angel’s hand to the floor between them, and in the angel’s hand is the olive, the messenger of peace; what the olive meant to the city that commissioned the panel is one of its open questions. Above, the dove descends at the apex of the arch, so that heaven, the word and the woman make one figure of descent and address, and the vertical is complete.
The panel’s inheritance was double. Behind it stood the calm Annunciation of Byzantine and Duccesque painting, and nearer stood Giotto’s figures of mass and gravity in a built space, in the Arena Chapel at Padua, the force of the age in Tuscany. This panel wagers against Giotto on line, gold and feeling: bodies drawn as calligraphy rather than modelled as volume, no cast shadow, no setting, the Gothic of the courts chosen over the Florentine body. The wager was real, and it was made within a Sienese tradition that welcomed it rather than alone.
One law governs the field. Every form is a contour laid on gold; every body is a line in a flat field of light; every colour is set as inlay. The words obey it, gold on gold; the vase obeys it; the prophets in their roundels obey it. The law holds from the dove in its wheel of angels to the flowered floor at the Virgin’s feet, and from Gabriel’s flying mantle to the upright Ansanus at the far left. It covers a calm order of saints and a moment of alarm, and it holds both, though the saints obey it at a lower intensity than the centre.
Movement V
The panel is the fullest statement of Sienese Gothic line set against Giotto’s mass, and it showed that sacred narrative could be carried by contour, gold and tension of feeling rather than by weight and space. Simone’s own move to Avignon carried his manner north. The line and gold of the International Gothic run from this current, and the panel is counted its chief Italian source among panels. But much of that reach belongs to the painter’s whole art and to the Sienese school rather than to this panel alone, and the line that won the next century in Florence was Giotto’s, then Masaccio’s. It redirected one strong current, not the art’s main course. The Arena Chapel (9.3) is the reorganisation of the field; this panel is the strongest answer to it, not its equal.
The image is the image made in 1333. The figures, the words, the gold and the colour stand, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. The losses are of fabric and site. The panel has been taken from the altar it was made for, and the cathedral’s programme of altars to the city’s patrons, of which this was one, is broken up. The present frame, which carries the inscription, is reported to be a later remaking, a point not settled here. The panel has known restoration, whose scope is not set out here.
The edges are where the altarpiece yields. The two saints are required by the altar and not by the Annunciation; removed, the scene would lose a civic frame, not a meaning, and the roundels are conventional furniture. Yet the frame holds orders the scene alone would not: the city in its patron saint and its cathedral altar, the prophetic past in the roundels, beside the sacred, the person and the moment on which Christian time turns. Nearest in kind on the desk is Rublev’s The Trinity (8.9), a sacred panel of line and colour with no lateral fields, whose necessity and form are tighter. Here the centre is near necessity inside a format that permits more than it compels, and at the centre the word is still crossing the gold toward a woman who has not yet answered.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged part by part. The central scene resists subtraction nearly everywhere. Gabriel cannot go, nor his olive branch and crown; the words cannot go, for they are the event; the vase of lilies cannot go, set exactly in the gap between the two figures where the meeting does not yet happen; the dove at the apex completes the vertical. The Virgin’s recoil, her mantle drawn to her throat and her thumb in the book, is the picture’s reason. What yields is at the edges. The two saints are patrons required by the altar, not by the Annunciation: removed, the scene would lose a civic frame, not a meaning. The roundels are conventional furniture. A central field of near necessity inside a format the argument permits rather than compels holds the axis here, the lowest but one.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated. The coming of the divine into a life is first an alarm: the Virgin turns away, her body twisting back on the throne, her face drawn down and wary, her hand at her collar. Consent is not given in this instant; it lies ahead, outside the picture, and the picture makes the gap between address and answer visible as a distance of gold. A word spoken to a person is a thing that crosses space and arrives, and here it is made of the same gold as heaven. Holiness disturbs before it consoles. These are claims about people, and they hold outside fourteenth century Siena. Held at the bar because the disclosure is one moment of a text already given, read with unusual candour, and the saints add nothing to it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is high and recurs across the field. The gold itself, a ground that is not air but light, out of which the figures stand like inlay; Gabriel’s arrival, still in motion, his mantle lifting behind him as if the flight has not finished, his wings barred in gold and colour; the raised words in their line across the gold, which catch the light as the viewer moves; the Virgin’s deep blue against the gold and her shrinking contour, one of the great single lines in painting; the dove in its wheel of angels above. The register is grace and awe together. It holds below 9.0 because the range is narrow: one register, one instant, no grandeur of scale and no terror beyond the Virgin’s start, and the saints at the sides are at a lower pitch, upright and still.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built and load-bearing. The Annunciation is itself an archetypal structure: the messenger from above, the virgin chosen, the word that becomes flesh. The picture does not allude to it; it is built on it. The messenger kneels at the left, the chosen one sits at the right, and between them stands the vase of lilies, purity planted at the hinge; the dove descends at the apex, so that heaven, the word and the woman make one figure of descent and address. The word passing as gold from mouth to ear is the conception itself, the old figure of conception through hearing given visible matter. The particular stays particular: a young woman interrupted at her reading, keeping her place with her thumb. Held below the top because the myth is built faithfully, not refounded.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Byzantine and Duccesque Annunciation, calm and frontal, the Virgin accepting; and nearer, Giotto’s figures of mass and gravity in a built space, in the Arena Chapel at Padua of the early 1300s. The departure: the Virgin’s recoil carried further than the tradition had carried it, the trouble Luke gives her made the subject; the greeting set in raised gold across the field; line made the instrument of feeling, bodies drawn as calligraphy rather than modelled as volume; the olive for the lily; Gabriel still airborne as he speaks. The stake was real: Giotto’s naturalism of weight and space was the force of the age in Tuscany, and this panel wagers against it on line, gold and feeling. Held here because the wager was made within a Sienese tradition that welcomed it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. The gold ground is the instrument: there is no room, no horizon, no air, so that the space between angel and Virgin is not a distance in a house but a distance in heaven’s own light, and the word crosses it in that light. Raised words could not exist in this way in oil or in fresco: they are built of gesso and gold, part of the ground they cross. The width of the central field is used as the measure of her withdrawal; she pulls to the right edge of her throne, and the empty gold between them is the hesitation. Line carries the feeling because nothing else is permitted to. Held below 9.0 because the polyptych and its saints are a container more than an instrument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: about seven centuries, and a history of looking of real depth, though narrower than that of the greatest pictures. The questions stay open: the division of hands between Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi; the identity of the right-hand saint; whether the Virgin’s start is fear, modesty or the first of an ordered sequence of responses to the angel; the olive and its civic meaning; the relation of this altar to the cathedral’s programme of patron altars. Return yields: the fold at her collar, the thumb in the book, the angels in the dove’s wheel, the punchwork. It sits below the inexhaustible works, among them The Arnolfini Portrait (9.4), because its meaning, once seen, is seen; what returns is its beauty more than new sense.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Italian painting of the 1330s. The intrinsic force is high: the fullest statement of Sienese Gothic line set against Giotto’s mass, a demonstration that sacred narrative could be carried by contour, gold and psychological tension rather than by weight and space. The discount is real: much of the reach is the painter’s whole art and the Sienese school’s rather than this panel’s alone, and the line that won the next century in Florence was Giotto’s, then Masaccio’s, not this. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Simone’s own move to Avignon carried his manner north; the line and gold of the International Gothic run from this current, and the panel is counted its chief Italian source among panels; its reach as a prototype for later Annunciations is widely held, though not traced here. One strong current redirected, not the art’s main course.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost seven centuries. The form is whole: the image is the image made in 1333, the figures, the words, the gold and the colour stand, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: centuries on its altar in Siena Cathedral, then in Florence and on public view in the Uffizi, among the best known paintings of its century; wide presence earns at most a tenth. The charges are of fabric and site, not of form: the panel has been taken from the altar it was made for, the cathedral’s programme of patron altars is broken up, the present frame is reported to be a later remaking, and the panel has known restoration. They hold it at the lower end of its band, below The Arnolfini Portrait (9.4) and Primavera (9.3).
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of tempera and gold on panel, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing at the highest level. The line: Gabriel’s profile, the Virgin’s contour twisting from shoulder to hem, the hand at her collar, drawn with a control few painters of any century have matched. The goldsmith’s work of the ground: tooled haloes, punched borders, the brocade of Gabriel’s robe, the words raised in gesso and gilded, legible and integral. The colour: ultramarine against gold, the patterned mantle flying in the air, the grey and gold of the wings. The placing: two figures balanced across a wide field with the vase at the exact hinge. What holds it below the very top is the side panels, competent and stiffer, and their drapery, which does not reach the central scene.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dove in its ring of angels at the apex and the flowered floor at the Virgin’s feet; or Gabriel’s flying mantle and the upright Ansanus at the far left. One law holds. Every form is a contour laid on gold, every body a line in a flat field of light, every colour set as inlay. The words obey it, being gold on gold; the vase obeys it; the prophets in their roundels obey it. Nothing in the work contradicts its physics. The range is moderate rather than wide: the law is applied to a calm order of saints and to a moment of alarm, and holds both, which is real. Held at 9.0 rather than higher because the saints obey the law at a lower intensity, so that the edges are consistent but slacker than the centre.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, as the descent of the spirit and the word; the person, in the Virgin’s alarm and her reading; history, as the moment on which Christian time turns; the prophetic past, in the four roundels; the city, in Siena’s patron saint, the olive of peace and the cathedral altar for which the panel was made; the natural order, in the lilies and the olive. They are integrated by the descent from dove to word to woman, and the civic frame is real. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or merely present: no labour, no family beyond the implied, no state except as patronage, nature as emblem rather than world, the prophets as furniture. A two-figure scene in a polyptych holds several orders; it does not encompass a world.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, The Imperishable at 9.2 and The Inner Law at 9.0. Line drawn with a control few painters have matched, and a ground of gold in which the words of the greeting are raised and gilded as part of the field they cross; an image that has come through almost seven centuries whole in form; and one law, contour on gold, that holds from the dove at the apex to the saint at the edge.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the sacred, the person, history, the prophetic past, the city and nature as emblem are held by the descent from dove to word to woman, but labour, the family and the state are absent, and a two-figure scene does not encompass a world. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.3, a central field of near necessity inside a polyptych whose saints and roundels the scene does not require; and The Unconcealment at 8.5, one moment of a given text read with unusual candour.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5 by seven tenths, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 by three tenths, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 by a tenth, and The Unconcealment at 8.5 stands on the line. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5; the lowest, The Inevitable, stands at 8.3) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 104.4, an average of 8.70 that displays 8.7, three full points of the sum short of the Tier V display.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the altarpiece in the Uffizi, Florence: its composition and figures, its colour, the raised gold words of the greeting, the olive branch, the vase of lilies and the dove among angels; knowledge of its technical history is thinner. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the altarpiece as it now stands, as one work: the central Annunciation, the two flanking standing saints (Ansanus at the left, and at the right a female saint traditionally named Margaret, sometimes given as Saint Massima) and the four prophet roundels in the gables, tempera and gold on panel, 1333, signed with Lippo Memmi. Under the rule that what was made is all one work, the whole is credited or charged to the altarpiece; the central scene is generally given to Simone Martini and the saints and roundels commonly to Memmi, and the division is stated as an attribution, not a fact. The present frame and the restorations bear on The Imperishable only. The words quoted are the inscription of the greeting raised on the panel, Luke 1:28 in the Vulgate. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact wording of the frame’s inscription, the date and making of the present frame, the dimensions, the names of the four prophets, the year the panel came to Florence, the companion altarpieces of the cathedral’s other patron altars, a civic reading of the olive tied to Siena’s rivalry with Florence, a scholarly reading of the Virgin’s states that may cite this panel, the scope of the restorations and any alteration of the blues, and the particular later painters who drew on the panel.