Annunciation

The Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna was an anonymous Roman or central Italian painter of the early fourteenth century named for a Madonna in the Museo del Palazzo Venezia in Rome. His Annunciation belongs to the critical transitional moment in Italian painting when Byzantine conventions were being modified by the spatial and emotional innovations associated with the post-Giotto generation. The Annunciation was the subject that most directly required painters to address the relationship between two figures across a defined space, making it a test of compositional innovation.

The panel retains the gold ground and the frontal, hierarchically scaled figures of the Byzantine tradition, but the Annunciate Angel and Virgin are given a slight three-quarter turn toward each other that introduces a spatial dialogue absent from strict Byzantine iconography. The gold tooling in the robes is executed with the careful punch-work of a Cosmati-influenced Roman workshop.