The Annunciation

The Louvre catalogues this small canvas as the work of Agostino Carracci, and a sheet of his pen studies for an Annunciation survives in the museum at Angers. Yet the scholars who catalogued that drawing found the Louvre picture closer to the manner of his younger brother Annibale in his first years in Rome, and wondered whether Agostino's own painting of the subject was ever made at all. The question is still open.

What the canvas shows is clear enough. The angel kneels on a cloud before the Virgin at her prayer desk, God the Father looks down among angels, and a sewing basket sits on the floor. Its later history is clear too. It was in the collection of Cardinal Mazarin, the minister who governed France while Louis XIV was a boy. Then it passed to Achille de Harlay, the king's attorney general at the Paris Parlement, who gave it to Louis XIV in 1684, and it hung at Versailles before coming to the Louvre in 1798.