About this work
The scene is among the most charged in all of Christian iconography, and El Greco rises to its magnitude. The painting captures the moment the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will be the mother of Jesus Christ — Gabriel, standing on a cloud, his body in rotation, his arms crossed at his chest, while Mary meets his gaze with a calm expression and open arms.
The interior of the room is filled with clouds and flashing lights, so that the objects surrounding the Virgin — the simple prie-dieu, the book opening like a fan, the sewing-basket and the vase — are removed from real space and saturated with mystic significance.
The upper half of the composition is filled with a cloud of glory in which a choir of musical angels plays instruments, while El Greco unites the earthly and celestial realms with a ray of light made up of cherubs' heads through which the dove of the Holy Spirit descends.
On steps at the bottom of the painting sits a sewing basket and a rose bush set alight in flame — a burning bush placed between Mary and the angel, alight but not consumed, to represent Mary's virginity.
The emotional force of the painting is increased by the use of contrasting colour and the style of the brushstroke.
Painted in Toledo between 1596 and 1600, *The Annunciation* was commissioned as a majestic altarpiece for the most important altar in the College of Our Lady of the Incarnation in Madrid.
El Greco found inspiration for this composition in Titian's own treatment of the Annunciation — a debt visible in the luminous palette — while the arrangement of the figures and the look of the drapery resemble work by Tintoretto.
During his lifetime, El Greco created around ten paintings on the theme of the Annunciation , and this late Toledo version represents the subject at its most spiritually concentrated. The painting has Expressionist elements — a style El Greco leaned into during his paintings towards the end of the 1590s.
Along with his depictions of *The Adoration of the Shepherds*, Saint Paul, and the mystic Saint Francis, his various versions of the Annunciation allow scholars to reconstruct his style and artistic evolution through a single subject.
Recent restoration has revealed El Greco's audacious technique — the brush deployed with enormous freedom, black strokes outlining forms — so that when seen from a distance, the canvas gives a strange and almost magical sensation of stained glass.
This is a painting that rewards scale and still
