THIS may very well be the primary chapter of the Gospel of Luke, or of John. It may be the dialogue between Gabriel and an apprehensive Mary, or the approaching of the Light into the world. Or perhaps it depicts Sura 19 of the Qur’an, by which a messenger of the Lord assures Mary(am), alarmed to search out a person in her room, that, although virgin, she is going to bear a son who can be an indication of mercy from God. In this single image, we may read all three accounts of the conception of Jesus — for Christians, the son of God; for Muslims “an indication to all people, a blessing from Us”. This is one among the nice stories that Christianity and Islam — with different inflections — share, however it is a bond rarely mentioned, a strangely neglected basis for closer contact and deeper understanding.
This yr, to an unusual degree, Lent and Ramadan overlap. In this image, the Gospel and Qur’an texts coincide, but they’re illustrated in a way that’s equally startling for each traditions. And with this painting, in 1898 — for the primary time ever — an African-American artist presented to the Parisian public a Western-Asian story not determined by European conventions. It was successful. Within a yr, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s large canvas had been acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Much admired and far discussed, it still hangs there today.
THE unusual middle name Ossawa refers to a town in Kansas, scene of a bloody skirmish in 1856 between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, an event later honoured by abolitionists as a heroic prelude to the Civil War. The legacy of that struggle informed Tanner’s faith — and his paintings — throughout his life (1859-1937). His mother had been born into slavery; his father was a distinguished clergyman (eventually a bishop) within the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
A star student at art school in Philadelphia, Tanner moved in 1891 to the racially freer, artistically intoxicating, world of Paris, where he became the primary Black American painter to enjoy international acclaim. His style reveals close study of how his French contemporaries painted the world; but he dropped at familiar biblical subjects his own particular understanding of what it meant — and means — for the common-or-garden and the meek to live in it. The child of the slave saw more, and saw afresh.
WE COULD hardly be farther from the hallowed, halo-ed, saccharine confections of Pre-Raphaelite or academic painting. In a modest, dishevelled Arab interior (Tanner had frolicked studying the lives of the poor within the Holy Land), this teenage Mary is bewildered and frightened, hands not clasped in prayer, but clenched in terror as she hears the angel’s words. She knows that, in her world, single pregnancy opens a cycle of rejection, destitution, and shame, prone to result in violence across generations.
What does she see at the tip of her bed? Is this a phantasm? The Qur’an states that the messenger of the Lord was in the shape of a perfected man; Luke calls him Gabriel. In the Paris of 1898, every spectator would have known pretty much what the angel of the annunciation was meant to appear like. But the African-American Tanner, steeped within the cultures of the Levant, decides not to indicate us God communicating together with his world through a young European male, even one with wings. Perhaps adopting Islam’s reticence in representing the divine, but more probably to raise the messenger above all questions of gender or race, he shows the bearer of God’s word quite simply as Light — the symbol of the Creator God in all three Abrahamic scriptures.
We are taken back to the start of time, and likewise to the edge of the brand new creation; for this shouldn’t be the dayspring from on high, but a filament of electrical light: modern, sensible, and unchanging. It is the sunshine of the long run, one which the darkness is not going to overcome; the sunshine destined, as everyone in Paris — the Ville Lumière — knew, to up-end the patterns of centuries, and herald a recent world.
THERE is nothing shrill about Tanner’s reworking of tradition, his discarding of conventions crystallised centuries before, which, nonetheless beautiful, were not fit for a universal purpose — were, in truth, an obstacle to tens of millions like him. The missionary Churches of the nineteenth century (the French distinguished amongst them) had achieved astonishing feats of translation, to spread the Word in lots of tongues. But just about all those Churches continued to make use of the pictorial language of 1 continent only. Tanner’s picture is one among the nice pioneers in working towards a recent visual vocabulary and syntax. He sets the story within the context of its biblical time and place, but he links that context to the circumstances of his day and avoids anything that limits the universal address of God to his world.
I believe that each Tanner and his picture confront us with tough questions. Do our familiar, Western European, images now obscure the reality that they were meant to light up? What would we expect God’s messenger to appear like? Would we’ve this young girl’s courage to say yes to the tough light of a contemporary angel? To risk the implications of claiming yes, on the planet because it now’s, with the principles that it now lives by? Crucially, given the ability imbalance of this conversation, is Mary in truth consenting, or merely submitting?
IN HIS vocation as an artist (and that’s how he understood his work), Tanner could see what facets of various traditions — realism, impressionism, symbolism — he could adopt and adapt, to fulfil his purpose. Does our Church strive to learn from other traditions to grasp God’s purpose more nearly? We share much with Islam: the Gabriel who appeared to Mary is identical Gabriel who, within the month of Ramadan, first communicated the divine words of the Qur’an to Muhammad. Do we pay proper attention to those Qur’anic words, and the traditions of those that follow them? It is striking that if you happen to look up “Lent” on the web, the early hits explain what it’s, and offer a history of Christian fasting. The first responses for “Ramadan” are an appeal to feed the hungry.
But to return to our picture, and our preparation for Easter: can we all see, as Mary seems to, that where that dazzling shaft of heavenly light intersects with our physical world — on this instance, the high shelf on the wall — it forms a cross?
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the creator of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
