Annunciation

There is a very small figure in this panel that a painter would not have been allowed to include a century and a half later. Above the Virgin, travelling down toward her on the rays, is the Child himself, already formed. Medieval painters used the motif often. After the Council of Trent, which sat from 1545 to 1563 and tightened what religious images could show, it was pushed out, because it made the incarnation look like a delivery rather than a conception.

Pere Serra painted this around 1404, in Barcelona, at the end of a long career supplying altarpieces to churches across Catalonia. It is a small thing, 59 centimetres tall, once part of a larger structure. The angel wears violet. The vase of lilies stands in the crowded foreground and tips slightly toward you, which is how painters of that generation showed you an object rather than placing it in depth.