Miniature Painting of the Annunciation, from the Dolls' House of Petronella Dunois

This Annunciation is painted in oil on a sliver of alabaster just over three centimetres high, in a small ebony frame, and it was made for the wall of a dolls' house. The house belonged to Petronella Dunois, a wealthy orphan in Amsterdam, and several of its objects carry the year 1676. Its eight rooms, from a peat loft to a lying-in room for a new mother, show a well-off household down to its silver. The Rijksmuseum gives the tiny picture to an anonymous Antwerp painter. The angel holds a lily at the left, and the Virgin sits by a bed and a reading desk at the right.