Annunciation

This panel, about 16 centimetres high and 60 across, was the central scene beneath a large altarpiece in Pistoia, a town northwest of Florence. Around 1475 the bishop, Donato de' Medici, ordered the altarpiece from the Florentine sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio for a chapel built against the cathedral. Still unfinished in 1485, it was painted largely by his workshop, above all by Lorenzo di Credi. The main panel, the Virgin and Child with two saints, is still in the cathedral, and another piece of the predella is in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Louvre acquired this panel in 1861 from the collection of the Marchese Campana, and from the 1880s several connoisseurs gave it to Leonardo da Vinci. Scholars today divide between Lorenzo, Leonardo and the two together, and the Louvre leans to Credi, pointing to the large eyes and simple expressions of the angel and the Virgin.