Full of grace.

CALM, MUSING, CONFUSED, SERENE, SHOCKED, pondering, cupped on wordless, hands the breasts that soon will suckle the Incomprehensible Mercy, she is hardly able to comprehend what just happened, utterly unable to imagine what will happen, a teenage girl alone and amazed and rapt in the russet light. Cavallino gives us not the iconic sterile Madonna but an extraordinary girl, for that is what she was, hardly more than a child herself, all of 16 perhaps, but already a woman of wit and bone, able to quiz the angel, able to utter the most astonishing and immediate yes that ever leaped from lips, and then, when the angel departed from her, there she stood, or slid slowly to her knees, musing, pondering, wondering. What an avalanche of thoughts flooded in on that child at this moment, what an ocean of emotion aswirl in this graceful Jewish girl!

Yet she is calm; she cups her hands over her heart and closes her eyes and listens for the second heartbeat, the music that will change the world.

BY BRIAN DOYLE, editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland and author of The Wet Engine (Paraclete Press, 2005). Image: The Virgin Annunciate (1645-50) by Bernardo Cavallino. Oil on canvas on wood panel, 85.5 x 70 cm. Felton Bequest, 1968. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.