Die Verkündigung

Tintoretto painted this Annunciation in the early 1580s for the ground-floor hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a charitable confraternity whose members were mostly working people, and he gave the scene to them. Mary sits not in a palace but in a poor, half-ruined house, a straw chair coming apart, plaster falling from the brick. Through the opening you can see Joseph at his carpenter's bench, tools hung on the wall, absorbed in his work and unaware of the angel bursting in. The tiled floor and coffered ceiling deliberately echo the real room the painting hangs in. This was among the last of the enormous cycle Tintoretto made for the Scuola over more than two decades.