Verkündigung von Recanati

Lotto painted this Annunciation around 1530 for a confraternity in the small hill town of Recanati, in the Marches, and he broke almost every rule of how the scene was usually staged. Gabriel bursts in from the right, God the Father leans down from an upper corner, and Mary, instead of bowing serenely toward the angel, twists round to face us, hands raised, looking genuinely startled. The room is an ordinary domestic bedroom, cluttered with household things: an hourglass, a shelf, a reading stand. And down the middle, caught mid-stride, a tabby cat bolts across the floor in fright at the sudden apparition. Many read it as the devil fleeing before God's grace, though Lotto paints the animal as plainly as any house cat startled by an opening door.