Virgin Annunciate

Most Annunciations show two figures, the angel and Mary. Antonello da Messina, working in Sicily around 1476, cut the angel out entirely. We see only Mary, a young Sicilian woman in a plain blue mantle, looking up from her reading, one hand raised as if to steady the moment. The messenger is somewhere out in our space, unseen. Antonello had learned oil painting from the northern method, probably through Netherlandish work, and it let him build the face with a soft, exact light that Italian tempera could not give. The panel now hangs in Palermo, in the Palazzo Abatellis.