Annunciation

Alesso Baldovinetti's Annunciation, dated around 1457 and now in the Uffizi Gallery, is one of the most beautiful mid-fifteenth-century Florentine panel paintings and a demonstration of its maker's distinctive contributions to the Early Renaissance. Baldovinetti was deeply interested in landscape and natural light, qualities that distinguish his work from the more purely figural concerns of Castagno and Pollaiuolo, his contemporaries. The Annunciation — Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will bear the Son of God — was a subject that allowed Baldovinetti to combine the required religious narrative with a luminous landscape setting that establishes his particular identity among Florentine painters of the period.

Baldovinetti renders the Annunciation in a loggia setting open to a detailed landscape background, the natural environment given unusual prominence. The figures of Gabriel and Mary are rendered with the clear contours and precise drawing of the Florentine tradition. Light in the landscape is observed with exceptional sensitivity for the period.