Ecce Ancilla Domini!

Rossetti painted this Annunciation in 1849 and 1850, when he was barely twenty and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was brand new and out to overturn how English art was made. He breaks with centuries of tradition in a simple way: instead of Mary kneeling in prayer, she is a startled girl woken in her narrow bed, shrinking against the wall as the angel Gabriel holds out a white lily. The palette is almost bare, mostly white for her purity, with a burning blue and a touch of red. Gabriel has no wings you can see and hovers just above the floor on small flames. The Latin title is Mary's answer from Luke, behold the handmaid of the Lord. Rossetti himself preferred to call it plainly The Annunciation. A patron bought it in 1853 for fifty pounds.