Annunciation (Memling)

The Annunciation is an oil painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. It depicts the Annunciation, the archangel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus, described in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:26). The painting was executed in the 1480s and was transferred to canvas from its original oak panel sometime after 1928; it is today held in the Robert Lehman collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The panel shows Mary in a domestic interior with two attendant angels. Gabriel is dressed in ecclesiastical robes, while a dove hovers above Mary, representing the Holy Spirit. It expands upon the Annunciation wing of Rogier van der Weyden's Saint Columba Altarpiece of c. 1455. According to the art historian Maryan Ainsworth, the work is a "startlingly original image, rich in connotations for the viewer or worshiper".^[1]

The iconography focuses on the Virgin's purity. Her swoon foreshadows the Crucifixion of Jesus, and the panel emphasizes her role as mother, bride, and Queen of Heaven. The original frame survived until the 19th century and was inscribed with a date believed to be 1482; modern art historians have suggested that the number's final digit was a 9, which would give a date of 1489. In 1847, the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen described the panel as one of Memling's "finest and most original works".^[2] In 1902, it was exhibited in Bruges at the Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges, after which it underwent cleaning and restoration. The banker Philip Lehman bought it in 1920 from the Radziwiłł family, in whose collection it might have been since the 16th century; Antoni Radziwiłł discovered it on a family estate in the early 19th century. At that time, it had been pierced through with an arrow and required restoration.