L'Annonciation

By the time Memling painted this in Bruges, the great Netherlandish trick was already settled: put a sacred scene inside an ordinary room and let the room carry the meaning. So the angel meets Mary not in a temple but in a comfortable bedchamber, and nearly everything you can pick out on the shelves is doing quiet double duty. The glass carafe with light passing clean through it stands for her purity. The lilies say the same thing. The candleholder is empty because she is about to become the one who carries the light of the world. Memling borrowed the whole layout from an older panel by Rogier van der Weyden, then changed the key moment. His Virgin does not kneel in calm acceptance. She swoons, sinking back, held up by two angels who have stepped in to catch her. It is a small human adjustment to a scene painters had settled centuries earlier, and it turns a formula back into something happening to a person.