The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius

Crivelli painted this in 1486 for the friars of Ascoli Piceno, a small town in the Italian Marches, and it marks a piece of local news. Four years earlier the pope had granted the town a measure of self-government, and word of it happened to arrive on the 25th of March, the feast of the Annunciation. So Crivelli folds the town's good fortune into the sacred scene. The angel Gabriel kneels in a street of gleaming Renaissance buildings to tell Mary she will bear a child, but beside him kneels a second figure who has no business in the Gospel, the bishop Emidius, patron saint of Ascoli, holding a little model of the town. High on a wall runs the words for ecclesiastical liberty, the title of the papal grant. A beam of light carrying the dove crosses the sky and passes through a small opening to reach the Virgin inside.