Annunciation

Caravaggio painted the Annunciation around 1608–09 during his Maltese period, depicting the moment when the Archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary with the divine message. The painting was lost for centuries and only attributed to Caravaggio in the twentieth century. His late treatment of the subject — one he had not previously painted — shows the characteristic austerity of his final period: fewer figures than the Italian Annunciation tradition usually required, the space simplified, the divine apparition rendered with a directness that gives the encounter an immediacy quite different from the conventional treatment. The work belongs to the group of late paintings that increasingly stripped away narrative complexity to concentrate on the essential human encounter with the divine.

The intimate composition reduces the Annunciation to its essential elements—the angel and the Virgin in near-darkness—with Caravaggio's late, simplified style using broad areas of shadow and minimal detail.