WHY BUY

• Magnificent and real colors
• It makes any room elegant
• Perfect for a prestigious gift

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The work

Annunciation 1472-75
Tempera on wood, 90 x 222 cm
Uffizi Gallery, Florence

A lush enclosed garden, in front of a Renaissance palace, evokes the hortus conclusus which alludes to the purity of Mary. The Archangel Gabriel kneels before the Virgin, offering a lily.

The Virgin responds from her dignified seat, behind a lectern, where she was reading. The traditional religious theme was set by Leonardo in an earthly and natural environment. The angel has a solid corporeality, suggested by his shadow on the grass, and by the folds of his robes, which would seem to show studies from life. Its wings are also based on those of a powerful bird of prey.

An extraordinary twilight models the shapes, unites the scene and emphasizes the dark shapes of the trees in the distant background, dominated by the nuanced colors so loved by the artist. The architectural elements are drawn according to the rules of perspective, with a central vanishing point. Some anomalies are found in the figure of the Virgin, whose right arm appears too long - perhaps a reflection of Leonardo's early optical research, which would have taken into account a lateral point of view (from the right) - and lowered, due to the original location of the painting, above a side altar in a church. The painting was brought to the Uffizi in 1867 from the church of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside Porta San Frediano in Florence; nothing is known of its original location or who commissioned it.

The Annunciation is generally considered one of Leonardo's early works, painted when he was still working in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop. It copies an invention by Verrocchio, the shape of the lectern, inspired by the tomb of Piero il Gouto in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.

How reproductions are made