The Annunciation

Tintoretto painted this in 1577, and Venice that year was climbing out of horror. A plague had burned through the city for two years and killed something like a third of its people, tens of thousands, before it finally lifted. Titian, who had ruled Venetian painting for half a century, was among the dead, carried off the year before, which left Tintoretto the reigning master of the city. He stages the angel's visit to Mary inside a Venetian house of his own day, the kind of room his patrons actually lived in. Down in the lower-left corner a cat lies curled, an ordinary household animal present at the strangest of moments.