L'Annonciation

By about 1490, when this small panel was made, Sandro Botticelli was one of the busiest painters in Florence, and much of the work leaving his shop was shared with assistants, this Annunciation among them. It was painted for the church of San Barnaba in the city, and an inscription on the back still records that home. The subject is one of the oldest in Christian art, the angel Gabriel telling Mary she will bear Christ, but look at what happens behind Gabriel on the left: a row of columns opens onto a distant lake and trees, the floor tiles narrowing to pull your eye back through real, measured space. Florence was then obsessed with that kind of geometry, and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo, a friend of the painter, was raising the same clean arches across the city.