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How to Read Paintings: The Annunciation by Botticelli
Enter a small but perfectly formed world
This is a small painting, just over 30cm wide. Yet if you let your eyes move beyond the bare wood of the outer margins and enter the scene, it gradually takes on a much grander dimension.
In The Annunciation, Mary is visited by an angel in her private quarters. In the Christian tradition, the Annunciation describes the moment when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she would become the mother of Jesus Christ.
In the painting, a linen curtain has been drawn to one side, allowing us to see into Mary’s chamber whilst also telling us that this is a private space. A row of pillars divides the space occupied by the angel from the intimate chamber of the Virgin. Before her there is a book resting on a stand; in Annunciation paintings, Mary is often shown studying scripture.
The first interesting thing to notice is the architecture. Whilst the scene depicts an event from the Bible, Botticelli has shown it taking place in a 15th century Italian setting. The image shows Mary within a loggia — a room with open sides. It is a way of including contemporary, and therefore familiar, architectural detail into the work whilst also suggesting a modest, enclosed setting. The secluded space, or sometimes a walled garden or a tower, indicates Mary’s purity.
Within the painted setting, Botticelli has used the rule of single-point perspective to create a realistic sense of space, so that all the lines of the columns and walls converge towards a single ‘vanishing point’ in the very centre of the image — around where Gabriel’s head sits. Perspective was a new innovation in Italian art after the architect Filippo Brunelleschi systematised the principles in the early decades of the 15th century.
The sense of depth in Botticelli’s painting is made all the more compelling by the use of foreshortening and diminishing size. For instance, the floor beneath the feet of the angel is broken into bands. As the room recedes, so the bands narrow and get closer together. If you imagine the floor without these bands, the effect of receding space would not be as great.
