天使报喜

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar, and he painted this Annunciation in the mid-1420s for the convent of San Domenico at Fiesole, where he lived. He builds the meeting of Gabriel and the Virgin under a bright arcade using the new mathematical perspective that Florentine artists were just then mastering, so the porch recedes cleanly into depth. But look to the left, into the garden. Adam and Eve are being driven out of Eden, and that is the point. The moment of the angel's greeting is set right beside the fall it will one day undo. Along the base runs a strip of small scenes from the Virgin's life, from her birth to her death, painted with the same jewel-like care.