Verkündigung

By the mid-1490s the Florence Botticelli knew had turned inside out. The Medici, who had once paid him to paint pagan goddesses, were driven from the city in 1494, and from the pulpit of San Marco the Dominican friar Savonarola preached repentance and bonfires and a stripped-down faith. Botticelli was in his fifties by then, and his religious painting grew plainer and more intent, the way it is here. The angel and Mary stand in a nearly bare room, and the whole exchange is carried by their hands and bowed heads rather than by any ornament. This was never a public altarpiece. It was the center of a small portable altar for private prayer, flanked by wings of Saint Dominic and Saint Jerome that now hang in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.