Leonardo da Vinci, about 1472 to 1476. Oil and tempera on poplar, 98 × 217 cm. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.
A reading of the panel in thirteen stages, taken at the scale at which it was painted. Scroll to move across the picture.
The panel measures 98 by 217 centimetres, a ratio of roughly one to two and a quarter. Two squares of 98 centimetres set side by side account for 196 of those 217, leaving a band of some 21 centimetres at the centre. The vertical axis of the picture falls inside that band, in open landscape, clear of both figures.
Florentine Annunciations of the period are usually upright, with the two figures close together in a room or a loggia. Leonardo placed the angel at the left edge and the Virgin at the right, and opened a considerable stretch of country between them. The panel is generally thought to have hung above eye level in the church of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside Florence.
The wings are constructed as a bird's wings are constructed, springing from the shoulder with short coverts at the base and long primaries at the tip. The same interest occupies Leonardo in the notebooks on flight compiled thirty years later, where the wing is studied as a mechanism rather than an attribute.
Their present outline is not entirely his. The tips were lengthened by a later hand, and the extension reads more flatly than the modelled feathers nearer the body, where the light is carried across each rank in turn.
Lilium candidum, held in the angel's left hand. It carries the customary reference to the Virgin's purity, and is at the same time the emblem of Florence, so that the flower serves doctrine and civic feeling together.
The drawing of bud, reflexed petal and anther is exact for its date, at a moment when botanical illustration as a discipline barely existed. A silverpoint study of a lily at Windsor is often associated with the panel. It does not correspond exactly to the painted stem, and Popham doubted the connection for that reason, though a preparatory sheet that differs from the finished work is not unusual.
The lectern before the Virgin comes out of Verrocchio's workshop. Its scrolled supports, inlaid porphyry and cast ornament follow the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de' Medici in San Lorenzo, completed in the same years, and Leonardo was working in the shop that made it.
It is the most sculptural object in the picture and the nearest to the spectator. Placed at the front of the deepest passage of space, it fixes the near limit against which everything behind it is measured.
The joints of the paving, the base course of the building, the upper surface of the lectern and the cornice above the Virgin are parallel in fact. In the picture they converge on a single point at the right, at the height of the horizon, and the built half of the composition is governed by it.
The rule behind the construction is arithmetical. In the notes later gathered as the Trattato della pittura, Leonardo sets the plane of the picture one braccio from the eye and shows that an object standing four braccia away is reduced on that plane to a quarter of its height.
The lines shown here are traced over the painting as a guide to its behaviour. They are approximate and are not a survey of the panel.
Seen from directly in front, the Virgin's right arm reaches further than an arm can, and the top of the marble table sits uneasily on its supports. Both difficulties diminish when the panel is looked at from below and from the right, which is the position a visitor would have taken in the setting for which it was made.
Whether the adjustment was calculated, or whether these are the errors of a young painter working at an unfamiliar scale, remains in dispute. The observation matters either way, since it makes the beholder's place part of the picture's construction.
The central axis falls on empty ground, between the hedge and the mountain behind it. On either side of it the picture answers itself: dark masses of foliage at both edges, a figure at each end, and the garden wall carried level across the full width.
The trees are the plainest instance. They stand at nearly equal intervals, giving the garden the measure of a colonnade rather than of a wood. Voloshinov describes mirror symmetry as the commonest of the devices shared by architecture, painting and nature, and it is the first order a young painter would impose. The intervals repeat; the trees themselves differ slightly in mass and lean.
Each figure is contained within a triangle: the angel from the knee through the shoulders to the raised hand, the Virgin from the spread of her robe to the head. Two stable shapes at the extremities hold a very wide field together.
The same figure governs Leonardo's account of sight. Rays converge from the world upon a point in the eye, and the surface of the picture is a section taken across that pyramid. His rule for the size of things and his rule for their arrangement are therefore one rule, which is why the optical diagrams in his notes read like compositional ones.
Beyond the hedge lie a harbour, a spit of land, small vessels, and mountains that give up their contours entirely. The recession is managed by colour and contrast rather than by drawing: warm and sharply defined in the garden, cooler and softer across the water, and at last a pale blue scarcely separable from the sky.
Leonardo set the principle down as an instruction, that distant trees should be laid in with a deeper azure because the air between is thicker. The same reasoning, carried much further, produces the softened contours of his later work.
The foreground is a hortus conclusus, the walled garden of the Song of Songs, long attached to the Virgin. Where the motif is ordinarily decorative, here the ground is populated with plants that keep their own habits of leaf and flower and are scattered as plants scatter.
Leonardo used the point against a colleague. He records the opinion, usually taken to be Botticelli's, that a sponge thrown at a wall leaves a stain in which a fine landscape may be seen, and answers that the stain may suggest a landscape but will never furnish any particular tree. The foliage of Botticelli's Cestello Annunciation is composed of repeated blocks of leaf; this ground is composed of species.
The account in Luke 1, 26 to 38 runs through five moments: the greeting, the Virgin's alarm, the reassurance, the announcement itself, and her assent. Painters choose one of them. Leonardo takes the interval while the words are still arriving. Gabriel's right hand is raised in blessing, the Virgin's left lifts a little from her lap, and her right hand remains on the open book.
The book is part of the argument. She is reading when she is interrupted, and the passage is understood to be the prophecy in Isaiah of a virgin who shall conceive.
The angel's eyes and his raised fingers stand at very nearly the height of the Virgin's head, and the announcement travels between them along that level. Everything else stops short of the middle. The lily, the hedge and the garden wall all halt; the look and the hand are what cross.
Projected to the right, the line from the fingertips arrives at the Virgin's raised left hand, a little below her eyes, and her answering glance returns along the same corridor. The camera follows it here from one hand to the other, about 127 centimetres of painted surface, at an inclination of less than two degrees from the horizontal.
Set aside the subject and the panel remains an unusually complete demonstration of how a wide field may be ordered. Two weighted masses at the extremities. A quiet centre carrying the depth. One long horizontal, the garden wall, tying the halves together. Repeated verticals for measure. Warm colour in front and cool behind, doing the work of recession.
Definition is rationed rather than distributed evenly, and this is the least imitated part of the method. The lily and the raised hand are the crispest things on the panel, and they hold the attention because everything around them has been allowed to soften.
Questions
In the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. It came from the church of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside the city, and entered the Uffizi in 1867.
Usually dated between about 1472 and 1476, when Leonardo was in his early twenties and still attached to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. It is the earliest surviving commission of this size associated with him.
Viewed frontally her right arm is longer than it should be and the marble table is awkwardly foreshortened. Both are eased if the panel is seen from below and from the right, the angle from which it would originally have been read. Opinion is divided on whether the effect was intended.
Probably not. The picture was produced in a busy workshop, and the Virgin's drapery in particular has been given to Verrocchio or to an assistant by various scholars. The tips of the angel's wings were added later by another hand. On its arrival at the Uffizi the panel was catalogued as Ghirlandaio; the attribution to Leonardo was argued from 1869.
Lilium candidum refers to the Virgin's purity and is also the emblem of Florence. The walled garden in the foreground carries the same meaning, taken from the Song of Songs.
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