天使报喜与两位跪拜的供养人

Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar as well as a painter, made this Annunciation in Florence around 1445. The angel kneels before Mary in a cool interior of coloured marble, with a walled garden visible beyond, a standard sign of her purity. What was less usual sits in the foreground: two kneeling donors, the people who paid for the picture, shown at the same full size as the Virgin and the angel. A generation earlier such patrons would have appeared tiny, tucked into a corner. Who exactly they were is no longer known. They kneel just behind a low stone barrier, hands pressed together, at the very edge of the holy scene.