Altar of Mary: Annunciation to Mary

The Master of the Polling Panels's Altar of Mary depicting the Annunciation to Mary, painted around 1444 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is part of a major altarpiece cycle from a Bavarian monastery that represents the most important documented painting commission of mid-fifteenth-century Bavaria. The Polling panels, produced for the Augustinian monastery at Polling near Weilheim, are among the most significant ensembles of German late Gothic panel painting surviving in any single collection.

Tempera on panel. The Annunciation places Gabriel at left with lily staff and the Virgin at right in a domestic interior. The angel's wings and elaborate drapery are rendered with the decorative intensity of the Bavarian Gothic tradition.