Annunciation

Marie de' Medici, the widowed queen mother of France, ordered this from Guido Reni in Bologna in early 1629. She was trying to lure the most admired painter in Italy to Paris to decorate her Luxembourg palace, a job Rubens had begun, and this Annunciation was meant as a first taste of what he could do. Reni gives the scene his trademark polish, a graceful, downcast Virgin and a gliding angel amid soft clouds and clear color, all calm and no strain. Reni never did come to Paris. The picture went instead onto the high altar of a Carmelite convent church in the city. When the Revolution shut the convents down in 1792, it was carted off to storage, and it became one of the founding paintings of the new public museum that opened in the Louvre that same year.