The Annuciation to St Joachim

Macrino d'Alba's Annunciation to St Joachim, painted in 1493 and now in the Städel Museum, depicts the apocryphal moment when an angel appears to Joachim — father of the Virgin Mary — to announce that his long-barren wife Anne will conceive a child. This episode, drawn from the Golden Legend and the apocryphal Gospel of James, was among the opening scenes of the Life of the Virgin narrative cycle and carried enormous devotional weight in late medieval and Renaissance Marian piety. Macrino d'Alba was a Piedmontese painter whose lyrical, Perugino-influenced style brought fashionable Umbrian elegance to the courts and churches of northern Italy. The subject belongs to a series of Marian panels Macrino produced for local patrons in the 1490s, each distinguished by his characteristic soft palette and graceful figure types. The Städel panel is a refined example of how Umbrian stylistic innovations spread northward through Italy in this decade.

Macrino arranges angel and patriarch in a balanced, airy composition with the characteristic pale landscape of his Umbrian-influenced style receding in gentle atmospheric tones behind the figures. Drapery is rendered in softly rounded folds of rose and blue, and the angel's gesture of announcement carries the restrained elegance that distinguishes this artist's best narrative panels.