The Annunciation

This altarpiece was made around 1609 or 1610 for the Jesuits of Antwerp, for the chapel of one of their sodalities, brotherhoods of laymen who met to pray and study under Jesuit guidance. Its audience, in other words, was a room of Antwerp laymen, not a crowd in a cathedral. Rubens gives them a sudden arrival. The angel Gabriel has only just landed, his robe still billowing, painted in warm, shifting colour that owes a lot to Venice. Mary, by contrast, is kept cool and simple in the blue and white that tradition prescribed for her, leaning back from the intrusion. The strong fall of light and shadow across the two figures is the lesson of Caravaggio, whose work Rubens had studied in Rome. The canvas stayed with the Jesuits until 1776, when it was acquired from their professed house in Antwerp for the imperial collection.