The Annunciation

In the early 1420s, when this small panel was painted, Florentine artists were gripped by a new idea, that space could be built on a flat surface by mathematics, floor tiles and columns shrinking toward a single point. Paolo Uccello would spend much of his life chasing that idea, so obsessively that Vasari said he neglected everything else for it. This Annunciation is early, before the obsession fully took hold, and for a long time no one connected it to him at all. It passed under other names for centuries until, in 1980, it was finally proved to be a work of the young Uccello. The angel kneels at the left, the Virgin at the right, a colonnade opening behind them into depth.