The Annunciation

In 1528 this canvas went to the infirmary chapel of San Bernardino in Ferrara, a convent of Poor Clares founded some 20 years earlier by Lucrezia Borgia, then duchess of Ferrara. She had died in 1519, and the picture was made for the chapel where the convent's sick sisters were cared for.

The angel kneels in the foreground on the left, richly dressed, with a crown on his head and three white lilies in his right hand, pointing toward Mary. She is at a wooden prie-dieu in a red dress and blue mantle, head bowed, turning the pages of a book with one hand and holding the other to her breast. Between a pair of tall columns the dove of the Holy Spirit flies down, and with God the Father and Christ among the clouds at the upper left it forms a diagonal that ends at her. Behind her is an ordinary room, with a fire burning in the hearth and a cat.

The nuns kept the picture until some time before 1624. It then passed to the Pio family in Rome and reached the Capitoline in 1750.