Writing in his seminal Modern Painters, John Ruskin tells us of how in Tintorreto’s The Annunciation he glimpsed Mary as though "startled by the rush of angel wings". It’s a wonderful phrase, juicy and descriptive, yet one which strikes me with a certain remoteness when reading over it. The welter of formal dinners, college hijinks, and looming deadlines doesn’t exactly make for the revelation which Ruskin so eloquently described.

Nevertheless, in pursuit of something similar, I attended ‘The Angel and the Virgin’ this weekend, the Fitzwilliam’s latest exhibition to be held in their almost claustrophobic Charrington Print Room. Carefully curated by visiting artist Lino Mannocci, the interest of this show is not so much the focus upon a Biblical story, much less the cloying obsession with its moral symbolism, as the insight it provides into how artists have performed variations on one special theme and its complex iconography.

Mannocci has taken his chosen etchings and juxtaposed overtly unlike images, to create an exhibition which leads us in multiple directions. Moving around, it’s often as if the piece at hand is being sent up and pastiched by the next, and the next after that. Just as in one rendering by Barocci, Gabriel holds his hand out to a wry Mary, as if going begging, in Jacob de Gheyn’s version he veers cartoonishly into her line of vision, almost putting her off from the scripture she’s supposed to be reading. In this oscillation of techniques, from graceful suspense to zany drama, we find an exhibition which might otherwise appear cold and pious. Rather, as viewers of this art we are encouraged to put one moment through various transformations, to catch the angelic light of these prints in an array of different lenses. John Ruskin eat your heart out.