Fra Carnevale

Master of the Barberini Panels

Marchigian, active c. 1445 - 1484

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Italian painter (1420-1484)

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On a tiled courtyard between buildings with arches and columns, a winged angel kneels and looks up at a woman standing to our right in this vertical painting. Both people have pale skin, blond hair, and plate-like gold halos at the back of their heads. To our left, the angel wears a silvery-white tunic under a scarlet-red cloak lined with cobalt blue. The wings are fawn brown on the underside, closer to the body, and aquamarine blue on the outside. Gold lines delineate feathers. The angel holds a white lily with two blooms and four buds on a long stem in the hand farther from us, which rests on a bent knee. The other hand is raised in front of the chest. The woman, Mary, stands along the right edge of the painting, her body angled toward the angel. Mary’s long, wavy hair falls to her shoulders, and she wears a lapis-blue robe with a pine-green lining over a red dress. She holds her right hand, farther from us, to her chest and touches the fabric of her cloak with the other, by her hip. The tip of one red shoe peeks out under her voluminous robe. Between the angel and Mary is a stone-white urn with scrolled handles, holding a bouquet of pink and white roses with dark green foliage. The ground is tiled with squares marbled in pale pink, sky blue, rust red, charcoal gray, and brown. Narrow, white panels between the tiles create a grid. The buildings around the pair are fog gray, parchment white, shell pink, or coral red, and are trimmed in black, red, or pink. Rows of arches recede into the square behind the angel and woman, ending at a coral-red wall that encloses the courtyard. An arched doorway in that wall opens onto a pathway leading over a small brook and into a hilly forest. A narrow, conical tree outside the courtyard reaches over the wall, into the vibrant blue sky above. A white dove descends from among the few scattered clouds with golden beams projecting toward the woman to our right.
Fra Carnevale, The Annunciation, c. 1445/1450, tempera on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.218

The Annunciation

Fra Carnevale · c. 1445/1450 · tempera on panel ·  Accession ID  1939.1.218

Bibliography

1796

  • Lazzari, Andrea. Dizionario storico degli illustri professori delle belle arti d'Urbino. In Giuseppe Colucci, ed. Delle Antichità picene. 32 vols. Fermo, 1796: vol. 31.

1939

  • Offner, Richard. "The Barberini Panels and Their Painter." In Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kinglsley Porter. Ed. W.R.W. Koehler. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1939: 205-253.

1971

  • Battisti, Eugenio. Piero della Francesca. 2 vols. Milan, 1971: 1:503 n. 360, 514-515.

1976

  • De Angelis, Laura, and Alessandro Conti. "Un libro antico della sagrestia di Sant' Ambrogio." Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 3rd ser., no. 6, pt. 1 (1976): 77-109.

1983

  • Bruschi, Arnoldo. "Bartolomeo Corradini" In Dictionario biografico degli italiani 29 (1983): 332-335.

1990

  • Bellosi, Luciano. "Giovanni di Francesco e l'arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento." In Pittura di luce. Giovanni di Francesco e l'arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento. Ed. Luciano Bellosi. Exh. cat., Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Milan, 1990: 11-45.

2003

  • Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 181.