Annunciation

Garofalo, the painter's nickname, was the leading master of Ferrara, and in his own day people called him the Ferrarese Raphael. He earned the tag honestly, having gone twice to Rome to study what Raphael and Giulio Romano were doing, and this Annunciation, painted around 1535, shows what he carried home. The story is the one from Luke, the angel Gabriel telling Mary she will bear a son, but Garofalo stages it in a deep, measured space that draws the eye past the two figures, through an open landscape and back into the Virgin's bedroom, the most private room of the house. The clothes burn with the strong reds he had learned to love from Venetian painting, above all Titian. The panel hung for generations in the Pitti Palace before it moved across the river to the Uffizi in 1773.