With a big personal writing deadline at the end of the semester, I wasn’t going to try and write any new Art + Advent reflections this year. But then, I got to say, “Yes!” to a surprise opportunity, and now I’m happy to share that my essay “Made in Human Likeness” is part of the November/December print issue of Christianity Today magazine. It’s available online here, too.
This is some of my favorite kind of non-academic writing: finding a thread that connects an old artwork with a contemporary one. In this case, it’s The Annunciation Triptych (ca. 1427–32) from Robert Campin’s workshop) and Julia Hendrickson’s watercolor and salt Prayer Book (2024).1 I’m including a short excerpt from the essay below, but you’ll have to go to Christianity Today to read the whole thing.
In my art history classroom, I dim the lights and turn on the projector. The image pools on the screen at the front of the room. The heaviness of another news cycle, along with my own family’s fragile health, weighs on me like the thick, damp fog blanketing the college campus where I work. But along with my students, I begin searching the picture on the screen.
We are not looking for a hidden Da Vinci Code cipher or a proof of artistic genius. As we study images of crisp frescoes and architectural ruins, we are seeking out the ripples of Christ’s incarnation.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” the apostle John writes (John 1:14). Jesus, the eternal God, born of a woman, settles in our material, temporal existence. The Incarnation dignifies and reaffirms God’s commitment to the world that he made and that he promises to make whole again. He does not abandon us to our despair but enters into it. Humans’ ability to make art—to materialize meaning—is an echo of not only a creator God but also an incarnate God.
As I leave the classroom, the day’s weightiness still hovers, but it is also pierced. Again and again, art renews and expands my wonder over the miraculous reality of the Incarnation: God with us, a light shining in the darkness. The art I love best invites me to hold things in paradox.
Theologian William Dyrness writes, “[Art] shows us something we can learn in no other way.” Two very different artworks that reference “God with us,” made hundreds of years apart, suggest both the challenge and possibility of this endeavor.
Learning from art in this way might not come easily to us. Our limited expectations of how works of art function might also truncate our understanding of the Incarnation.
Take, for example, the Annunciation Triptych, a 15th-century altarpiece made for a Flemish home by the workshop of Robert Campin. The center panel of the small devotional object depicts Gabriel’s announcement to Mary. The archangel kneels on the left side of the composition and addresses a seated Mary. We can almost hear Gabriel speaking the words from Luke’s gospel: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus” (1:31).
Meanwhile, Jesus himself—represented as a minuscule alabaster-white infant carrying a tiny wooden cross—bursts through a window above Gabriel’s head and zips through the air on a sharp, downward diagonal. If we trace the implied line of his descent, we find that he is heading straight for Mary’s womb. To our 21st-century eyes, it is an incredibly strange, even humorous, image.
We might think that the artists of the Annunciation Triptych are offering us an extremely literal illustration. It’s as if they thought, Well, the Incarnation is God with us, so here’s a picture of God on his way to be with us. Very little imagination is required; the painting’s meaning appears to sit on the surface.
We may interpret the painting in this way because we are familiar with pictures that directly tell us something: Advertisements and explainer graphics constantly announce what we should buy, who we should desire, and how we should think. If that is what we expect of images, then that is all we will see in the Annunciation Triptych. And thus, Incarnation becomes limited to a specific narrative moment rather than functioning as a cosmic folding of time and eternity. Wonder trickles away, absorbed by a dogmatic diagram.
There is much more to see in the Annunciation Triptych. But first we need a better way of seeing. Visual artworks do not merely tell us things; they can also form us.
The work of California-based contemporary artist Julia Hendrickson also invites us into the wonder of the Incarnation…
Visit Christianity Today to read more about Julia’s process, how a painting can remain itself while also becoming a book, why there’s a mousetrap in the Annunciation Triptych, and how we might understand the wonky perspective.
I got to see The Annunciation Triptych in person back in October while visiting New York. You have to make the hike up to the Met Cloisters to see it, but it’s worth it every time. Reproductions of the work in books or on a digital screen don’t quite convey just how intimate this folding, three-part painting is. The color is still luminous, and the detail is so exquisite you’ll want to set off the museum alarm by poking your nose too close to it.
I’ll end here, as I end the longer essay: Art helps me be more tender toward all I can’t see in the dark, to believe—even if I can’t comprehend—that the infinite could become an infant and settle here, with me.
If you want to hear Julia talk about this article and her work with Makoto Fujimura, you can listen in on their generous, beautiful conversation here.