The Annunciation

The Annunciation — the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God — was among the most frequently depicted scenes in Christian art and a devotional touchstone for the entire medieval and Renaissance tradition. Wilhelm Stetter was a minor German painter active in the early sixteenth century in the Swabian or Upper Rhine region, working within the tradition of local altarpiece production. This Annunciation, at the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, represents the continued production of devotional altarpiece imagery for German church patrons in the years of religious crisis preceding and coinciding with the early Reformation, when such traditional imagery was simultaneously cherished and contested.

The composition follows the standard Annunciation format — Angel and Virgin separated by the compositional center, the lily as attribute of purity, the dove of the Holy Spirit descending. Swabian figural types with angular drapery and bright saturated color convey the solemnity of the divine encounter within a local Germanic aesthetic.