In the Gospel of Luke, neither God nor the Holy Spirit manifests any visible appearance to Mary; it is Gabriel alone who stands and speaks with her during the conception of Jesus. [...] And what a sight he makes. The Gospel of Luke mentions that when Gabriel first spoke to Mary, she was troubled (turbata, “troubled, disturbed, disordered, agitated, excited”) (1:29). And yet, according to the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, Mary received her daily sustenance from the hand of an angel. Why, then, would the familiar sight of an angel upset her so? According to ancient and medieval exegetes, although angels attended Mary every day, Gabriel must have been the first to appear to her disguised as a man. [...] And not in the likeness of just any man: the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew specifies that Gabriel appeared to Mary as “a young man of indescribable beauty.”
Medieval artists elaborated on this detail with enormous enthusiasm. Artists made the archangel ridiculously attractive, expending on him all their very best hairstyles and outfits. [...] As the only visible and humanoid agent of God’s envoy to the Virgin, Gabriel functions as an attractive showpiece—the Incarnation’s representative male object of desire onto which the medieval erotic gaze transfixed its ardent attention.
[...] Twelfth-century theologians described the Annunciation as a courtly romance, according to the rules of which [...] every lover needs an intermediary [...]. Aelred of Rievaulx identified Gabriel as God’s angelic go-between and bridesman, his paranymphus angelus. Yet as the legend of Tristan and Isolde attests, the courtly necessity of employing an intermediary puts the lover at great risk. When King Mark sent Tristan to woo Isolde on his behalf, Tristan wooed for himself. Small wonder, as the genre of courtly love tends to favor adultery over marriage. We all know how the story of the king, queen, and handsome knight tends to end.
— EMMA MAGGIE SOLBERG, from Virgin Whore.
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