Annunciation

The Master of Bonastre's Annunciation, painted around 1450 and now in the Museu de Belles Arts de València, depicts the foundational moment of the Christian narrative — the archangel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God — in the Valencian late Gothic style that characterized this painter's work. The Master of Bonastre is an anonymous Valencian painter named after a family whose patronage is connected to this work, active in the mid-fifteenth century in a tradition shaped by the court culture of Alfonso V of Aragon and his Valencian successors.

Tempera and oil on panel with the Valencian synthesis of Flemish naturalism and local decorative tradition. The Annunciation places Gabriel and the Virgin in an elegant interior with tiled floors and carefully observed symbolic objects.