Annunciation

An angel has announced to Mary, engaged to Joseph, a descendant of David, that she will conceive and give birth in such a way that the Holy Spirit would come to her and the power of the Most High would engulf her and the Son of God would be born.
 
This frequently depticted scene is presented in a special and original way. The contact of the real world with the visionary scene is also presented in a carefully built Baroque composition. The opening in the sky from which the Holy Spirit is descending in the form of a white dove has a dramatic light intensity. The glowing light also divides the space of the painting in a zone of clouds, where a hovering angel with a decorative loin cloth disappears in the fog and the space where the kneeling Virgin Mary receives the news with surprise. The intimacy of the format and the theme indicate that this paining was most probably created for private worship. 

The attribution to Venetian artist, Pietro Liberi, thanks to the idealized Venetian blond haired young women represented in various anatomically impossible poses, is recognized. However, through his use of mechanical shadowing rather than tenebrism he rarely succeeded in creating a distinguished expression in his depictions and true sensuality in his shapes. 

Apparently, the adaptation of this theme was successful because Liberi repeated it several times. A related painting of a larger size, which is in private ownership, is the closest to the Bratislava version. Isaak Fischer, a Dutch artist who was commissioned to create an altar painting for the church of San Giorgio Martire in Porcia, worked on an almost identical composition. 
 

Zuzana Ludiková ● LUDIKOVÁ, Zuzana - BURAN, Dušan. Talianska maľba = Italian Painting. Bratislava : Slovenská národná galéria, 2013. 242 strán. ISBN 9788080591748.