Verkündigung

Caravaggio painted this Annunciation around 1608, in the last two years of his life, while he was on the run after killing a man in Rome and moving between Malta and Sicily. It ended up far from Italy, in Nancy in eastern France, given by Henry the Second, Duke of Lorraine, to his church there as the main altarpiece. Time has not been kind to it. The picture was badly damaged and heavily repainted over the centuries, and the part scholars still trust as Caravaggio's own hand is mostly the angel, dropping in from the upper left toward the kneeling Mary. Even damaged, the loose, quick brushwork is typical of how he worked at the end. It was cleaned and restored in Rome in 2010, for the 400th anniversary of his death.