The Annunciation: The Angel

Gabriel steps in from the right, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a sceptre topped with lilies, the flower of Mary's purity. He is half of a pair. This panel and the Virgin beside it were the outer wings of a small altarpiece Kulmbach painted around 1513. The colours are cool and delicate, and the museum sees in them his southern side, a lightness taken from Italian painting and set against figure types learned from Dürer. The two wings turned up far from Nuremberg. They were sold at the Heberle auction in Cologne in October 1889, passed to a collector named Hasselmann and then to the Oppolzer collection in Prague and Innsbruck, and in 1907 the Viennese collector Gustav von Benda gave them to the museum. Today they share one frame, the angel still facing Mary across the gap.