The Annunciation

This small panel has puzzled scholars for a long time. It was painted around 1450, in the first great age of oil painting in the Low Countries, and the Metropolitan gives it to Petrus Christus, who took over the leading workshop in Bruges after Jan van Eyck died. Others have argued for a different, older hand. What is unusual is the setting: instead of the tidy bedroom where the angel Gabriel usually finds Mary, she stands in the doorway of a church that is half Romanesque and half Gothic, so the building itself marks the turn from an old order to a new one. It is only a fragment cut from a larger work. Look closely and the plants at their feet are recorded almost as a botanist would.