La Visitation dans l’art: Orient et Occident, Ve–XVIesiècle by Anne Marie Velu (review)

In this handsome book, entirely printed on coated stock and lavishly illustrated (99 figures, 27 of them in color), Anne Marie Velu aims to understand a specific development in the iconography of the Visitation in the late-medieval West. To the scene in which Mary, having been informed by the angel Gabriel of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, meets and often embraces the future mother of John the Baptist, artists often added the two unborn children, portrayed either in the bubble of their mothers’ transparent wombs or as hovering in radiating mandorlas in front of them. The space given by Velu to basic overviews of topics such as the rise of the image in early Christianity suggests that she wants her findings to be accessible to a wide audience of general (and perhaps pious) readers interested in medieval art and religion. After a brief introduction explaining that her conclusions arise from a series of fifty-six visual examples in a wide range of media and diverse geographical origin—every image of her subject that she found—she begins with chapters on narrative and liturgical sources. For the texts explicitly including the unborn children, she relies on the Protoevangelium of James, the Meditationes vitae Christi, and the female mystics of the fourteenth century. An exploration of the many manifestations and developments of this scene in later medieval Latin and vernacular narratives such as lives of Mary and Jesus, as well as the most likely avenues for its widespread distribution, would have filled a gap in Velu’s source study. The chapter on cult and liturgy briefly traces the introduction of the feast of the Visitation in Eastern and Western Christianity, and describes the places of the Visitation in The Little Office of the Virgin, the central text in Books of Hours, as well as in various cycles of prayers that eventuated in the rosary.

Chapter 3 begins the study of visual motifs: the embrace of the two women and Elizabeth kneeling. The detail of hand gestures opens the next chapter, followed by considerations of secondary characters and of the space in which the two women meet. The chapter then turns to the inclusion of the divine: the Trinity and angels. In chapter 5, Velu focuses on her central subject: images of the Visitation that either suggest or actually delineate the unborn children. Efforts to understand these images take her to medieval attitudes toward pregnancy and the embryo, and specifically to the drawings of fetuses in scientific books. A search for origins leads her to ask whether this image was created in the East or the West, which she answers with ideas of inter-penetration or entanglement.

Chapter 6 locates the impetus for Visitations with visible children in the mystic spirituality and devotional practices (such as Jesus dolls and cradles) of the beguines and other female religious, especially German and Flemish mysticism, relying heavily on the scholarship of Jeffrey Hamburger to do so. Such images appear in a range of media and a variety of milieux and are concentrated in the fifteenth century. The last chapter articulates the thesis that appears to have motivated this project—that Annunciation and Visitation often form a closely interlinked pair because together they visualize the mystery of the Incarnation, thus meeting the need to see that was compelling in the late Middle Ages. A brief conclusion treats the demise of this image under the strictures of the Council of Trent as interpreted by Johannes Molanus. One might regret that Velu neither took great advantage of the many studies of the medieval female body published in recent years, nor exploited the theorized work of feminist medievalists on Marian imagery. Yet, different approaches serve different audiences, and many who would not read those books will enjoy and learn from hers.