天使报喜

Paolo Veronese painted this Annunciation in 1578 for the merchants' guild of Venice, and he set the sacred meeting inside a piece of the most modern architecture of his day. The angel Gabriel arrives on the left, the Virgin receives the news on the right, and between and behind them runs a grand colonnade opening onto a garden, with a domed temple beyond. That architecture is not invented from nothing. Venice was then in the middle of a building boom led by Andrea Palladio, and the little temple in the distance closely resembles a Palladio church completed that very year. The columns and receding arches owe as much to the printed stage-set designs then passing among Venetian painters. Above the central arch you can still find the guild's emblem, a hand blessing a cross.