Description
The Annunciation – Leonardo’s first independent painting
The Annunciation is the earliest large work Leonardo made while still a young painter, and for a long time it was not even thought to be his. The wide, almost cinematic composition shows the moment the angel Gabriel brings Mary the news. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this quiet garden scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A painting credited to the wrong painter
Leonardo painted the Annunciation around 1472–1476, when he was barely twenty and still in Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop. When the work entered the Uffizi in Florence in 1867 it was catalogued as a Domenico Ghirlandaio. Only in 1869 did the art historian Karl Eduard von Liphart recognise it as an early Leonardo; the attribution was supported by a preparatory drawing held at Christ Church, Oxford. The original is painted in oil and tempera on a poplar panel and measures 98 × 217 cm.
What the painting shows
On the left kneels the angel Gabriel, wings just folded and a hand raised; beneath his knees the grass is painted so precisely that botanists have identified individual species. On the right Mary sits at a stone lectern, her hand on the book, answering with a restrained gesture. Between them opens an enclosed garden, and beyond it a harbour and mountains that dissolve into blue in the distance – Leonardo’s aerial perspective already at full strength.
The mistake that isn’t one
For centuries painters pointed out an awkwardness: Mary’s right arm looks too long, and the lectern oddly displaced. The prevailing explanation today is that this is not an error but a calculation. The painting was made for a side altar, where the viewer stood to its right and lower down; from that angle the proportions resolve. Already at twenty, then, Leonardo composed for the place from which the work would be seen, not for an ideal frontal position. The explanation is generally accepted but not documented – we give it as the best reading, not as established fact.
A hand-painted reproduction for your home
Every reproduction of The Annunciation is entirely hand-painted in oil on canvas – not a print, but a real painting created for you by an experienced artist. It is available in nine sizes, stretched on a wooden frame on request and in a frame from our 3D range. The markedly wide format works well above a bed, above a long sofa, or in a hallway where ordinary paintings look cramped. Among our canvas wall art you will also find Leonardo’s early Florentine works: The Baptism of Christ, The Madonna of the Carnation and Ginevra de’ Benci.
- Subject: The Annunciation, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1472–1476
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 9 dimensions in wide format, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: Mary’s arm looks too long only head-on – from the right-hand, lower angle the work was made for, the proportions resolve
