马尔泰利天使报喜

Look at the foreground of this Annunciation and you find a small glass vase, so carefully painted you can watch the light pass through it. Fra Filippo Lippi placed it there around 1440 for a chapel belonging to the Martelli family in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The transparent glass was an old symbol of the Virgin, believed to have conceived without losing her purity, as light goes through glass and leaves it whole. Lippi had learned to paint such things from Netherlandish pictures then reaching Italy. The rest of the scene is built on the new mathematical perspective that Leon Battista Alberti had just set down in writing, the floor and arches receding by rule. After a long restoration the panel returned to its place in San Lorenzo in 2016.