Della Scala Annunciation

This was never meant to be a picture on its own. Around 1528 Andrea painted it as the cimasa, the panel that crowns an altarpiece, for the church of San Domenico at Sarzana, up the coast towards Genoa. The main altarpiece went. This did not. It stayed in Florence with Giuliano Della Scala, the man who had charge of it, and that is the name it goes by here, though the state catalogue still files it as the Annunciation of Sarzana, after the town it never saw. Its shape is the evidence: it began as a lunette, and the two curtains at the sides were painted in to square it off into the wide rectangle you see, either by Andrea or, as one scholar argued, by a later hand in Rome. The altarpiece it should have sat above ended up in Berlin, and burned there in 1945.