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 This large detached fresco, painted by Sandro Botticelli in the spring of 1481, was originally in the portico of the hospital of San Martino alla Scala, in Firenze. Nowadays it is housed in the apse of the Church of San Pier Scheraggio, near the Uffizi. Botticelli composes the narration of the Annunciation in such a way as to communicate all the magnificence and the emotion of the moment. The Angel, driven by Divine Wind, presents himself to the Virgin who humbly draws back, even though troubled, and accepts the divine announcement. The articulation of the scene skillfully brings alive the relationship between interior (the right part of the fresco) and exterior (the left part) space, in an architectural and perspective visualization of God’s mystery. We see this in the domestic intimacy of Mary’s room, decorated in Renaissance taste, and in the background landscape which depicts, outside the city walls, hills, cypresses, and plants just awaken from their winter’s sleep, and thus conveying a sense of space as well as of the passing of time.
 The two panels, depicting the announcing Angel and the Virgin Mary, today surrounded by a simple wooden frame, originally were panels of an altarpiece or of a tabernacle. The holy meeting takes place within a quiet inner courtyard enclosed by a brick wall beyond which, the typical Tuscan cypresses appear in an almost hortus conclusus, outside time and space. It is a static image, even though it reveals a solid knowledge of perspective as seen by its use to show deep space in the series of buildings and little barrel vaults that rush to the background.
First attributed to Filippino Lippi, then to Raffaello Botticini, today it is unanimously assigned to Francesco Botticini. Judging from stylistic elements, the dating of the work can be placed between the 1480’s and the 1490’s owing to the similarities with the Tabernacle of Saint Sebastian, also in the Museum of the Collegiate Church, whose angels are similar even in their hairstyles and poses to the above mentioned announcing angel.
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