Right and Left in Art: The Annunciation

Abstract

Since the early study by Wölfflin, the question of right and left in pictures has been exhaustively discussed. The early speculative studies and the more recent empirical evidence are reviewed here. The main thrust of the article concerns the Annunciation in the iconography that was standard roughly from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Three major effects have been discussed in the literature in order to understand the positioning of the Virgin on the right. They are the direction of motion and the agency effect, both concerning the archangel, and the presentation of the Virgin's left cheek. It is proposed here that a fourth effect, the power of the first diagonal, is worthy of consideration, largely because it is the only effect that may obtain for variant Annunciations, in which the Virgin is on the left. Preliminary evidence from actual examples, albeit in a reduced sample, is discussed both in standard and variant Annunciations. In the final section, a preliminary experiment is presented, the results of which are consistent with the use of this rule in composition.