Annunciation

The Annunciation panel at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar represents one of the most theologically and artistically complex moments in Christian iconography: the archangel Gabriel's announcement to Mary that she will conceive the Christ child. Schongauer — working in the tradition established by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in the North, and moving toward the spatial clarity of the Italian Renaissance — would have faced the challenge of depicting an event that is simultaneously intimate and cosmic, ordinary domestic space and site of divine intervention. The lily, symbol of Mary's purity, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and Gabriel's liturgical greeting 'Ave Maria, gratia plena' are the fixed iconographic elements around which painters exercised their individual creativity.

Panel with the characteristic Schongauer combination of graphic precision and jewelled colour. The white lily is painted with the same attention he gives to metalwork in his engravings — each petal modelled individually. The angel's wings are composed of feathers differentiated in colour and form, a technical display of representational skill.