Keeper

The Door

62 The Door Early Netherlandish Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In these paintings of the Annunciation, the angel appears to Mary in a small walled garden, or what the guidebook describes as an “early bourgeois interior.” Instead of a bare Bethlehem kitchen, rooms lit with drapery and silver; instead of rocky, dun-colored desert, the soft greens and blues of the artists’ home. And everything takes part in the heavenly visit—the whole Monday morning world breathing and moving in the ordinary, astonishing light. Two pink hollyhocks by the crumbling stone wall as much as the angel’s iridescent wings; the horse’s shining rump, the silver shoe visible on his upturned hoof as much as Mary’s blue robe and patient hands. In one painting, she has been reading—her Bible lies open to a page filigreed with flowers. In another, the window behind her frames a courtyard in which two men stroll, discussing cattle or the weather. Most show Mary’s eyes fixed on the angel, but in this one, she gazes outward, toward her watchers, so calmly—as if there were no distance between those lilies and wings and this museum room, as if we could all enter that place so easily, as simply as stepping through a door. ...