Anunciación Ranieri

Around 1489 Perugino was one of the most sought-after painters in Italy, fresh from working on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. This Annunciation shows the manner that made his name: an airy, ordered room, a tiled floor running back in clean perspective, the Virgin looking up from her book as the angel Gabriel arrives. The calm is the whole point. Within a few years a boy from nearby Urbino named Raphael would pass through his workshop and carry this same spacious, gentle style into the next generation. The panel itself then disappeared into the collection of the Ranieri, a wealthy Perugia family, and stayed with them for centuries before returning on loan to the gallery in Perugino's own region of Umbria.