Verkündigung an Maria (Inv. Nr. 2.43)

Jörg Stocker's Verkündigung an Maria, painted around 1490 and now in the Museum of the Diocese of Rottenburg, depicts the Annunciation in the local Swabian devotional tradition associated with the diocese of Augsburg and the broader southern German painting culture of the late fifteenth century. Stocker was a Swabian painter active in Augsburg, one of the most prosperous cities in the late medieval German-speaking world and a center of artistic patronage that would later produce Hans Holbein the Elder and the Younger. The work belongs to the Museum of the Diocese of Rottenburg's collection of Swabian sacred painting, a significant repository of southern German devotional art from the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Stocker's Annunciation reflects the Swabian synthesis of Flemish naturalism and local German workshop conventions that characterized the region's devotional panel painting in the decades before Dürer's revolutionary impact.

Stocker employs the standard Swabian workshop approach to the Annunciation subject, organizing the angel and Virgin in a domestic or architectural setting with the measured symmetry and descriptive clarity typical of the regional tradition. The drapery and figure types reflect Flemish influence absorbed through the Augsburg workshop environment and the printmaking culture of the upper Rhine.