The Annunciation (c. 1580): Art, History and Details

The Annunciation (c. 1580) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paolo Veronese (Italian, 1528–1588); Workshop.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although Veronese is best known for his large-scale, pageant-like presentations, here the artist has taken the narrative of the Annunciation (the announcement of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and bear a son) and compressed the figures close to one another, creating a startling intimacy. According to a tradition established by the medieval writer Saint Bernard, Mary has been reading from the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah (7:14), "A young woman is with child and she will bear a son."

Object facts

• Title: The Annunciation
• Date: c. 1580
• Creator attribution: Paolo Veronese (Italian, 1528–1588); Workshop
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 176 x 159.5 x 9.5 cm (69 5/16 x 62 13/16 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 150 x 133.4 cm (59 1/16 x 52 1/2 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1950.251

A detail from the museum

The white lilies held by Gabriel are a symbol of Mary's purity and innocence, often appearing in depictions of the Annunciation.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Saemy Rosenberg, letter to Henry S. Francis, Nov. 3, 1966, in CMA curatorial file.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.