Annunciazione di San Giovanni Valdarno

This panel spent most of its life in a Franciscan convent near San Giovanni Valdarno, the Tuscan town it is named for. Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar as well as a painter, made it around 1430, and it became one of the versions of the Annunciation he came back to again and again, Gabriel on the left, Mary on the right, a walled garden closed off behind them. During the Second World War the Germans took it out of Italy. It came home thanks to Rodolfo Siviero, an Italian agent who spent the postwar years tracking down works looted during the occupation and getting them back. The predella beneath the main scene, with small stories from Mary's life, was largely left to his assistant Zanobi Strozzi.