EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Creation Theology

The painting above by an artist little known outside of Italy, Benedetto Bonfigli, is often titled The Annunciation of the Notaries and is dated to the middle of the fifteenth century. St. Luke who can be seen writing his gospel between the Virgin and the Archangel Gabriel is said to be a personnification of the notaries' profession. He is, though, something more poetic: a perfect illustration of how artists and spiritual thinkers in the Renaissance equated Christ's conception with their own.
 

Gabriel and Mary often face each other from either side of the entryway into a church or above an arch leading to the high altar as in this example by Giotto in Padua. The metaphoric implication of their positioning is that those who walk through the arch are walking into the Virgin's womb thereby making the church itself into a three-dimensional symbol of the human womb, inside the body of Woman, the soul of Creation. (For those following these connections, it is not unlike how Michelangelo turned the Sistine Chapel into a three-dimensional construction of his own head.)
 

That is why this depiction of the Annunciation is so significant. It helps demonstrate that at least this artist was following a path within the Inner Tradition. Instead of an entryway into a church it places St. Luke between the angel and Virgin in the spot where the Immaculate Conception metaphorically occurs. St. Luke, of course, is the patron saint of painters, not just notaries, the first artist according to legend to have drawn the Virgin from life. Here he writes like a notary and draws like an artist. It is as if to say that the artist's conception is equivalent to the Gospel of Luke, a much bolder claim for painting than many would suppose. It also suggests that both, gospel and painting, are the products of an immaculate conception, a mental conception similar to Christ's.

Creativity is the source of Creation, the original spark duplicated in the mind of a creative thinker. The variegated colored marble slabs in the background are too prominent to be meaningless and are possibly intended to suggest another state of consciousness, the creative fertility perhaps of an artist's mind in the process of thought, somewhat like the illustration of a mind on drugs. Kandinsky was later to think of colors in a similar way. Within the Inner Tradition, as common in the Renaissance as it is today, perhaps more so, God is inside us. Thus the birth of Christ symbolizes the emergence within the artist's mind of his own perfect conception of the universal Self, a Christ-like artist.

This painting, in a slightly didactic way, conveys that idea.