天使报喜

Correggio made this Annunciation as a wall painting in the 1520s, in the church of San Francesco in Parma, between the two enormous domes he was frescoing across the city. Then in 1546 the church was pulled down. Rather than lose the picture, the friars did something drastic. They set iron bars into the wall behind it, cut the plastered section free a little at a time, and carried that whole slab of wall to safety elsewhere in their convent. That is how a fresco, normally fixed to the building it was painted on, survives at all as a movable fragment. Mary and the angel meet in Correggio's soft, upward-drifting manner, the same weightlessness he was painting overhead in the domes at exactly this time.