The Annunciation

Bartholomaus Zeitblom was the leading painter of Ulm, the southern German city whose great minster was still rising, and he ran his workshop there through the decades around 1500. His art sits at the edge of the late Gothic world just before the Renaissance reached Germany in force. Contemporaries and later writers praised his cool, clear color and his calm, restrained figures, and admitted in the same breath that drama was not his gift. An Annunciation suited that temperament well. The subject is a quiet exchange, the angel Gabriel bringing Mary the news that she will bear Christ, and Zeitblom's still, gently draped figures give it the hush it asks for. Panels like this were usually wings of a larger altarpiece, painted on both sides and swung open or shut with the church calendar. Much of his work has since been broken up, the altars dismantled and their scenes scattered to separate museums, so a single Annunciation now stands on its own where it once belonged to a whole.