Paolo Veronese · PD
The Annunciation
Details
The story
In 1583 Veronese signed and dated a large Annunciation for the Escorial, the monastery palace Philip II of Spain was building outside Madrid. Around those same years his Venetian workshop was turning out much smaller versions of the same subject, made for private rooms rather than for altars, and this is one of them.
The composition was not invented for either picture. The angel and the Virgin set inside grand architecture go back to an Annunciation Titian painted about 1536. That canvas is lost, but Gian Jacopo Caraglio engraved it in 1537, and the print kept the design in circulation for decades.
Specialists still disagree about this small version on two points: how much of it Veronese painted himself rather than leaving to his assistants, and whether it came before or after the Escorial altarpiece. It reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington with the collection of Samuel Kress, an American chain-store owner.
