The Annunciation

At nearly four metres tall, this canvas is the size of a church altarpiece, yet when Anton Raphael Mengs died in Rome in 1779 it was still in his own hands. He painted it in the 1760s, the decade he spent in Madrid working for Charles III of Spain, and the museum's record names no church it was made for.

Above, God the Father leans out of a gold sky among a crowd of child angels, and the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers in a pool of light. Below, Gabriel kneels with a stem of lilies and points upward, while Mary lowers her eyes over the book on her prayer desk.

After the painter's death the canvas passed to his son Alberico. In 1810, with Rome annexed to Napoleon's empire and the pope held prisoner at Savona, the Austrian diplomat Ludwig von Lebzeltern bought it there. It only reached Vienna in April 1816, after the wars, and that July he gave it to the emperor's gallery.