Annunciazione di Cestello

Botticelli painted this altarpiece in 1489 for a Florentine moneychanger's family chapel, and it catches the city at a turning point. These were the years when the Dominican friar Savonarola was preaching in Florence against luxury and worldly display, and you can feel that pressure in the picture. Set beside Botticelli's own flower-strewn mythologies of a few years earlier, this room is nearly bare. The angel Gabriel kneels holding a white lily, the sign of Mary's purity, and Mary bends toward him with her whole body, hands raised, in a gesture that is almost a swoon. Between them the floor tiles run sharply back to an arch that frames a distant landscape, the perspective pulling your eye through the window and out. The intensity is in the poses and the empty space around them, not in ornament.