L'Annonciation

This panel was made around 1450 for the new Medici palace in Florence, the great house Cosimo de' Medici was building on the Via Larga. Its curved top tells you it was a lunette, set high on a wall above a door or a bed rather than on an altar. Look at the low stone parapet and you find the family woven in quietly, a carved emblem of feathers and a ring used by Cosimo's son Piero. Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar as well as a painter, gives the angel's greeting an unhurried domestic calm, the kind of scene meant to be lived alongside. It once had a companion of seven standing saints, also painted for the palace and now hanging a few rooms away in the same London gallery.