When we attempt to reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy
Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of
some great artist of the past. The Crucifixion comes to us as Dürer or
Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents itself to
us in terms of the imagination of Raphael; we see the Nativity as a
composition of Corregio. So the Annunciation rises before us when we
close our eyes and attempt to make "the composition of place" in a
familiar grouping of the actors: a startled maiden who has arisen
hurriedly from work or prayer, looking with wonder at the apparition of
an angel who has all the eagerness of one who has come hastily upon an
urgent mission. The surroundings differ, but artists of the Renaissance
like to think of a sumptuous background as a worthy setting for so
great an event.

We keep close to the meaning of Scripture if we set the Annunciation in
a room in a cottage of a Palestinian working man. And I like to think of
S. Mary at her accustomed work when Gabriel appeared, not with a rush of
wings, but as a silent and hardly felt presence standing before her whom
the Lord has chosen to be the instrument of His coming. Wonder there
would have been, the kind of awe-struck wonder with which the
supernatural always fills men; and yet only for a moment, for how could
she who was daily living so close to God fear the messenger of God? The
thought of angels and divine messengers would be wholly familiar to her.
They had been the frequent agents of God in many a crisis of her
people's history, and appeared again and again in the story of her
ancestors on whose details she had often meditated. Yet in her humility
she could but think it strange that an angel should have any message to
bear to her.

It is a striking enough scene, as the artists have felt when they tried