The Annunciation

Paolo Uccello's Annunciation, painted around 1420 for the Ashmolean Museum, is an early work that demonstrates his formation in the late Gothic tradition before his full engagement with perspective theory. The Annunciation was among the most frequently commissioned subjects in Florentine painting, with every church and household requiring versions. Paolo Uccello was among the most theoretically ambitious painters of fifteenth-century Florence, whose fascination with perspective led him to develop extraordinarily complex spatial constructions that astonished his contemporaries.

The composition sets the angel and Virgin within an architectural framework that shows Uccello's emerging interest in spatial recession, though the decorative elegance of the figures reflects his training in the International Gothic manner.