THIS could be the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, or of John. It might be the dialogue between Gabriel and an apprehensive Mary, or the coming of the Light into the world. Or perhaps it depicts Sura 19 of the Qur’an, in which a messenger of the Lord assures Mary(am), alarmed to find a man in her room, that, although virgin, she will bear a son who will be a sign of mercy from God. In this single image, we may read all three accounts of the conception of Jesus — for Christians, the son of God; for Muslims “a sign to all people, a blessing from Us”. This is one of the great stories that Christianity and Islam — with different inflections — share, but it is a bond rarely mentioned, a strangely neglected basis for closer contact and deeper understanding.

This year, to an unusual degree, Lent and Ramadan overlap. In this image, the Gospel and Qur’an texts coincide, but they are illustrated in a way that is equally startling for both traditions. And with this painting, in 1898 — for the first time ever — an African-American artist presented to the Parisian public a Western-Asian story not determined by European conventions. It was a success. Within a year, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s large canvas had been acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Much admired and much discussed, it still hangs there today.

THE unusual middle name Ossawa refers to a town in Kansas, scene of a bloody skirmish in 1856 between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, an event later honoured by abolitionists as a heroic prelude to the Civil War. The legacy of that struggle informed Tanner’s faith — and his paintings — throughout his life (1859-1937). His mother had been born into slavery; his father was a prominent clergyman (eventually a bishop) in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

A star student at art school in Philadelphia, Tanner moved in 1891 to the racially freer, artistically intoxicating, world of Paris, where he became the first Black American painter to enjoy international acclaim. His style reveals close study of how his French contemporaries painted the world; but he brought to familiar biblical subjects his own particular understanding of what it meant — and means — for the humble and the meek to live in it. The child of the slave saw more, and saw afresh.

WE COULD hardly be further from the hallowed, halo-ed, saccharine confections of Pre-Raphaelite or academic painting. In a modest, dishevelled Arab interior (Tanner had spent time studying the lives of the poor in the Holy Land), this teenage Mary is bewildered and frightened, hands not clasped in prayer, but clenched in terror as she hears the angel’s words. She knows that, in her world, unmarried pregnancy opens a cycle of rejection, destitution, and shame, likely to lead to violence across generations.

What does she see at the end of her bed? Is this a phantasm? The Qur’an states that the messenger of the Lord was in the form of a perfected man; Luke calls him Gabriel. In the Paris of 1898, every spectator would have known pretty well what the angel of the annunciation was meant to look like. But the African-American Tanner, steeped in the cultures of the Levant, decides not to show us God communicating with his world through a young European male, even one with wings. Perhaps adopting Islam’s reticence in representing the divine, but more probably to elevate the messenger above all questions of gender or race, he shows the bearer of God’s word quite simply as Light — the symbol of the Creator God in all three Abrahamic scriptures.

We are taken back to the beginning of time, and also to the threshold of the new creation; for this is not the dayspring from on high, but a filament of electric light: modern, brilliant, and unchanging. It is the light of the future, one that the darkness will not overcome; the light destined, as everyone in Paris — the Ville Lumière — knew, to up-end the patterns of centuries, and herald a new world.

THERE is nothing shrill about Tanner’s reworking of tradition, his discarding of conventions crystallised centuries before, which, however beautiful, were no longer fit for a universal purpose — were, in fact, an obstacle to millions like him. The missionary Churches of the 19th century (the French prominent among them) had achieved astonishing feats of translation, to spread the Word in many tongues. But almost all those Churches continued to use the pictorial language of one continent only. Tanner’s picture is one of the great pioneers in working towards a new visual vocabulary and syntax. He sets the story in the context of its biblical time and place, but he links that context to the circumstances of his day and avoids anything that limits the universal address of God to his world.

I think that both Tanner and his picture confront us with tough questions. Do our familiar, Western European, images now obscure the truth that they were meant to illuminate? What would we expect God’s messenger to look like? Would we have this young girl’s courage to say yes to the harsh light of a modern angel? To risk the consequences of saying yes, in the world as it now is, with the rules that it now lives by? Crucially, given the power imbalance of this conversation, is Mary in fact consenting, or merely submitting?

IN HIS vocation as an artist (and that is how he understood his work), Tanner could see what aspects of different traditions — realism, impressionism, symbolism — he could adopt and adapt, to fulfil his purpose. Does our Church strive to learn from other traditions to understand God’s purpose more nearly? We share much with Islam: the Gabriel who appeared to Mary is the same Gabriel who, in the month of Ramadan, first communicated the divine words of the Qur’an to Muhammad. Do we pay proper attention to those Qur’anic words, and the traditions of those who follow them? It is striking that if you look up “Lent” on the internet, the early hits explain what it is, and offer a history of Christian fasting. The first responses for “Ramadan” are an appeal to feed the hungry.

But to return to our picture, and our preparation for Easter: do we all see, as Mary seems to, that where that dazzling shaft of heavenly light intersects with our physical world — in this instance, the high shelf on the wall — it forms a cross?

Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the author of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).