The Annunciation and Expulsion from Paradise

This small panel by the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo combines two moments of sacred history in a single visionary landscape: at the right, the Angel Gabriel descends to greet the Virgin at the Annunciation, while at the left Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden, walk out of paradise past the tree of knowledge. Painted about 1435, the work shows the most imaginative painter of fifteenth-century Siena at his most fantastical — the world rendered as a tapestry of glowing colour, the gold sky and twisted trees, the tiny figures moving through a landscape that owes more to dream than to observation. It is a jewel of late Gothic Sienese painting, all arabesque and ornament, untouched by the realism that was overtaking Florence at the same moment. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.