Porta coeli: the Annunciation as Threshold of Salvation

In one of his earliest monographs, Studien zur beneventanischen Malerei (1968), Hans Belting concentrated on the arts of the Langobardia Minor, among which the painted crypt of the Abbot Epyphanius (824-42) in the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno was recognized the most important cycle in the early medieval southern Italy. Belting developed an interpretation of the murals, their style, and contents, by tracing connections within a wide geographical perspective. Although challenged and eventually refuted over the years, still his reading of the crypt is thought-provoking. Identifying in the murals “östliche Elemente”, and Constantinopolitan prototypes, he rejected Rome as their necessary mediator, ruling out any parallelism with murals made in Rome at the time of Paschal I (817-24). Inspired by the questions involved, the present paper concentrates on a specific image in the crypt, the Annunciation displayed to the sides of the fenestella confessionis. This faded mural is one of the earliest extant examples of the depiction of the scene with the two protagonists shown either side of an archway, window or door of an opening, as it will become customary in later art. The appearance of this kind of Annunciation will be understood not through a mechanical comparison with earlier and contemporary theological writings or works of art, but by trying to reconstruct the modalities of circulation of theological concepts between East and West in the period of the Iconoclastic controversy, by identifying the textual imagery derived by these concepts, and analyze its ‘translation’ into visual imagery as a result of influencing the contemporary religious mentality.