L'Annunciazione

Lorenzo di Credi trained in one of the busiest workshops in Florence, that of Andrea del Verrocchio, where one of his fellow apprentices in those years was Leonardo da Vinci. You can feel that shared schooling in this small panel from the early 1480s, in the careful light and the deep, clear landscape opening up between the two figures. Gabriel kneels at the left and Mary turns from her reading at the right. The clever touch is the low painted parapet across the front, decorated like a predella with three tiny scenes: the creation of Eve, the first sin, and the expulsion from paradise. They make a theological point, that Mary is the new Eve who will undo the old fall. The classical portico behind her was the fashionable architectural taste of the moment.