受胎告知

Lorenzetti signed and dated this in 1344, and it is the last work of his we can firmly date. He made it not for a church but for the Gabella, the tax office of the Sienese republic, to hang where the city's accounts were kept. Look at the tiled floor: he has drawn the lines of the pavement rushing back to almost a single vanishing point, reaching for the deep perspective that Florentine painters would only master a century later. Above it the gold is flat and old-fashioned, so the picture sits on the hinge between two ways of seeing. Four years after he finished it, the Black Death reached Siena, and Ambrogio and his brother Pietro both vanish from every record in 1348.