The Annunciation

Venice told a story about itself that ran straight into this subject. By tradition the city was founded on 25 March in the year 421, and 25 March is the feast of the Annunciation, the day the angel Gabriel comes to tell Mary she will bear a son. Venetians fixed their own beginning and this sacred moment on the very same date, so an Annunciation painted here carried a civic weight it would not have had elsewhere. Régnier made this one near the end, around 1666, when he was an old man long settled in the city. Gabriel kneels before the Virgin in a soft, warm light rather than the sharp shadow of his early years. He died in Venice the following year, in 1667.