ANDREA DEL SARTO
(b. 1486, Firenze, d. 1530, Firenze)

Annunciation

c. 1528
Oil on wood, 96 x 189 cm
Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

The painting was mentioned by Vasari as being the lunette of a picture which, after various wanderings passed to the museum of Berlin and was destroyed there in the Second World War. It had in fact the form of a lunette and was transformed to a rectangle at an unknown period. It is a late painting of Andrea.

In a supremely poetic range of changing colours, from yellow to pink to lilac to purple, it expresses Andrea's new taste, no longer favouring the intense and highly charged palette of the preceding years; he now chooses delicate harmonies, without dissonances, and of precious and refined accords which give the composition a new balance, more quiet and refined than before.