This early 20th-century painting of the annunciation seems to me to transcend time and place. This Mary could be any woman, this angel the messenger of any sort of epiphany— a new wisdom, a haunting reversal, clarity alone in the midnight hours. The sort of inescapable truth about our lives to which we can only reply, as she did, “let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)
Heather Choate Davis 