Annunciation

Behind Gabriel and the Virgin, a high wall closes off a strip of garden with fruit trees and dark cypresses rising over it. That garden is not scenery. A walled garden, the hortus conclusus, was an old sign of Mary's purity, the enclosed ground no one had entered. Baldovinetti painted this in 1457 for the Florentine church of San Giorgio alla Costa. He cared more for elegance than for correct anatomy, giving both figures small heads on long, slender bodies. Mary turns from a book propped on a tall reading stand, caught mid-motion, a pose that echoes the sculptor Donatello's gilded Annunciation in the nearby church of Santa Croce. The colours are kept clear and cool, and the light falls evenly, without shadow, across the marble floor where the angel kneels.