Annunciation
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) · about 1472
An angel kneels on a lawn of tiny flowers and raises a hand toward a young woman reading at a marble lectern. Behind them a walled garden opens onto a misty harbour, with ships, a mountain and a sky that fades to pale blue at the horizon. Leonardo painted this Annunciation when he was about twenty and still working in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, and it is the earliest large work that is confidently given to him. Mary looks up from her book with her left hand lifted in surprise, while Gabriel holds a lily, the flower of purity, and his wings are painted from real bird wings.
Look at the way the light behaves. The angel's shadow falls across the grass, the carved marble of the lectern is modelled with the same care as a face, and the distant landscape dissolves in a blue haze that Leonardo would later call aerial perspective. Every flower in the meadow is drawn as a botanist would draw it, and the drapery folds over Mary's knees were studied from cloth soaked in clay. Critics have long noticed that Mary's right arm looks too long. The panel was probably meant to hang high and be viewed from the right, and from that angle the arm falls into place.
The picture came from the Olivetan monastery of San Bartolomeo at Monteoliveto outside Florence and entered the Uffizi in 1867, where it was first attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio. Only later did scholars recognise the hand of the young Leonardo, and a related drawing in Oxford settled the matter. It is a rare chance to see the artist before he became a legend. A memorable detail is the lectern, which borrows its swirling decoration from the tomb of Piero de' Medici that Verrocchio was carving in the same years.
Did You Know? The lectern's ornament copies a Medici tomb that Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio was carving at the very same time.
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