1. The most famous sculpture of Hermes is Giambologna’s, from 1580 in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, which of course carries the caduceus on the left hand. There are dozens of copies of it, and of others inspired by it, some displayed in British gardens. The reader will easily find hundreds of photographs on the internet, but beware: some are inverted – which is disastrous in our case. A good example in painting appears in one of the three Raphael cartoons for the Vatican tapestries that are not inverted: The Sacrifice at Lystra, where a statue of Hermes appears in the background, with the caduceus correctly on the left arm. (The Vatican tapestry, of course, is inverted.)
2. Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts
3. Ordinal references to the Annunciation refer to their position in the database.
4. See for instance D. Denny (1977) The Annunciation from the Right from Early Christian Times to the 16 Century (New York: Garland). Readers must not confuse the positioning on the right-hand side of the divine with its positioning on the right of a picture. Thus, in the Last Judgement the saved are on the right-hand side of the Lord but on the left of the picture. On page 36 of the book by J. Hall (2008) The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), the author dismisses the problem of the Annunciation with this short sentence: ‘Thus the angel, … and the light of the Holy Spirit, come from the Virgin’s right (our left) because this is the traditional location of all things Divine.’ This, I am afraid, is amply contradicted by scriptural evidence: Jesus received the Holy Spirit from his left. Thus Acts 2:33: ‘… being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father [that is, from his left] the promise of the Holy Ghost…’.
5. Right and Left in Art: The Annunciation