Annonciation avec saint Jean-Baptiste et saint André

Filippino Lippi painted this Annunciation around 1485, flanking the angel and the Virgin with two standing saints: John the Baptist on the left, patron of Filippino's native Florence, and Andrew with his diagonal cross on the right. For a long time it hung not in Florence but in Rome, in San Luigi dei Francesi, the French national church there. Its move south came with an army. During the wars that followed the French Revolution, Republican troops took it from the church, and by 1801 it had entered a gallery in Naples, where it remains. Filippino was the son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and had trained partly under Botticelli, and the crisp line and nervous elegance of these figures come straight from that Florentine workshop world.