The Annunciation

When Veronese painted this Annunciation in Venice around 1560, he set the oldest scene in Christian art inside the newest architecture in the city. The angel does not slip into a plain room. He glides in on a cloud toward a grand columned hall that opens onto a landscape, the kind of palatial space Venetian patrons were then commissioning for themselves along the canals. Mary kneels at her reading desk on the enclosed left side, her body twisting sharply to meet him. Veronese fills the corners with the everyday things he loved to paint: a small dog beside the Virgin, a peacock perched on a capital to the right, her work basket resting on a stool. Scholars still disagree whether he made it around 1560 or closer to two decades later.