Annonciation

Around 1500 these two tall panels weren't a picture to hang on a wall. They were doors. They covered the organ in the Venetian church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, and worked like a hinged announcement. Closed, the congregation saw this Annunciation, the angel on one leaf and Mary on the other, the message passing across the gap between them. Swung open for services, the backs showed Saints Peter and Paul. Giovanni Bellini designed it and left much of the painting to his workshop, and it is the only domestic interior he ever set his figures in. The streaked marble lining Mary's room copies the pale pavonazzo marble that still panels the walls of the Miracoli today, so the painted room and the real one were meant to rhyme as you stood there.