The Annunciation

The Annunciation was painted as an altarpiece for the monastery of San Domenico in Fiesole, near Florence, where Fra Angelico himself was a Dominican friar. The subject — the angel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin that she would bear the Christ child — was one the painter returned to repeatedly, and this panel of about 1426 is among his loveliest early treatments. In it the clear colour, gold ground and quiet devotional gravity characteristic of the Dominican master join to raise a familiar biblical moment into a vision of serene, ordered light, an early triumph of the Early Renaissance in Florence.