天使报喜

This is a small thing, barely wider than a sheet of paper, and that scale is the point. Botticelli made it not for a church wall but for someone's private room, an image to pray in front of alone. He set the meeting of Gabriel and the Virgin inside a cool, tiled hall built with careful one-point perspective, a row of pillars dividing the angel from Mary's chamber as she kneels to take the news. For all its geometry the mood is hushed and intimate. By the 17th century it hung in the Barberini collection in Rome, and it reached New York with Robert Lehman, whose family gave it to the Met in 1969.