San Gallo Annunciation

Andrea del Sarto painted this Annunciation in his twenties for the church of San Gallo, an Augustinian monastery just outside the walls of Florence. That location turned out to matter. When Charles V's imperial army closed in on the city around 1529, everything beyond the walls was in the firing line, and the monastery was pulled down so it couldn't shelter the enemy. Its paintings, this one included, were carried inside the city to safety first. You can see the young painter pulling his influences together, the calm monumental figures he took from Fra Bartolomeo, the soft modelling he learned from Leonardo. Mary twists back from her book as the angel arrives, caught mid-movement rather than kneeling in stillness.