Annunciazione di Fano

Pietro Perugino painted this Annunciation around 1489 for the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Fano, a town on the Adriatic coast, and it still hangs in that same church today, which is rare for a picture this old. The moment is the one where the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will bear Christ. She has looked up from a book, caught mid-surprise, while Gabriel holds out a white lily for purity. Perugino places the two of them under a calm row of arches, with soft green hills and thin trees behind, the ordered stillness that made his name. A young apprentice from nearby Urbino, Raphael, would take exactly this sense of balance from his workshop. The church liked the picture enough to commission a second, larger altarpiece from him a few years later.