天使报喜

Masolino painted this in Florence in the early 1420s, exactly when the city's artists were teaching themselves the new trick of perspective, the idea that a flat panel could open like a window onto a room with real depth. He puts the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary not against the old flat gold ground but inside a furnished interior, with a column down the middle and an open door leading the eye back into the distance. He was still learning. Look closely and the columns seem to stand in front at their bases yet slip backward at their tops, and the two figures feel placed against the room rather than standing in it. Masolino worked in these years beside a younger, bolder painter named Masaccio, who would push the same idea much further.