A Anunciação

Filippo Lippi painted this Annunciation in Florence in the 1440s, at the height of the city's early Renaissance. It sets the familiar moment, the angel Gabriel kneeling to tell Mary she will bear Christ, inside a crisp architecture of clean lines and measured space that Florentine painters were then working out. Gabriel is young and slight, and Mary stands tall and narrow behind a small reading desk, pale and still. Between them Lippi lays out the new science of perspective almost like a diagram, the tiled floor and receding walls drawing the eye back. Lippi was himself a friar, and he returned to this scene again and again across his career.