Annonciation de Cortone

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar as well as a painter, and this altarpiece, made in the early 1430s for a church in his order, shows how completely the two went together for him. The angel Gabriel meets the Virgin under a delicate loggia, its slim columns and rounded arches straight out of the new architecture Florentine builders were then inventing. Gold rays carry the words of the greeting across the gap between them, literally painted onto the panel. Off to the left, in a small garden, Adam and Eve are being driven from Eden, the fall that this moment begins to undo. Angelico gives the whole scene a clarity that feels almost weightless, deep pinks and blues under even light. Below ran a row of small scenes from the Virgin's life, some now credited to a pupil. The panel still belongs to Cortona, the Tuscan hill town it was painted for.