The Apparition of Christ to the Virgin

The Gospels never say what the risen Christ did first. Medieval devotion filled the gap with an answer everyone found obvious: before anyone else, he went to his mother. Painters were asked to show the meeting the evangelists left out, and around 1490 Domenico Ghirlandaio painted this version of it, Christ appearing to Mary in a burst of light. At that moment he ran the busiest workshop in Florence and was covering the walls of a chapel in Santa Maria Novella with crowded, up-to-date frescoes. This little panel is the opposite kind of object. It is small, private, and deliberately old-fashioned, with a gold ground behind the figures and lines of Latin worked into the gold near their faces, one of them the old greeting Salve Sancta Parens, Hail, holy Mother. It was one of a set of at least three scenes from Christ's life. They were separated long ago, and today the others are in Rome and Copenhagen while this one hangs in Paris, bought by the Louvre in 2019.