The Annunciation

For a long time this panel was taken for Rogier van der Weyden's own work of the mid-1430s. The Louvre now catalogues it as coming from his workshop in Brussels, where assistants painted from the master's designs, and opinions still differ on how much of it, if anything, he painted himself.

It was once the centre of a small altarpiece. The two wings, a Visitation and a kneeling donor, are in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, and a coat of arms on one of them points to an Italian family named Villa, who probably ordered the triptych from the Low Countries. Italian merchants living in Bruges and Brussels in these decades sent this kind of painting home, prized for its clear light and close detail. The layout follows an Annunciation by Robert Campin, the Tournai painter in whose circle Rogier trained, with the angel arriving in a lived-in room.

The triptych later belonged to the dukes of Savoy in Turin. In 1799, with French troops in the city, the central panel was taken to Paris and entered the Louvre the following year, while the wings stayed in Turin.