Leonardo’s Annunciation: secrets and curiosities

This is an oil and tempera painting on a wooden panel (98×217 cm), a youthful masterpiece by Leonardo, dated between 1472 and 1475 and housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Precisely because of its iconic and symbolic value, Cantine Leonardo da Vinci chose this work to represent the Villa Da Vinci line, a collection dedicated to the estate’s Crus told through the details of the painting:

• S.to Ippolito Toscana Rosso IGT (on the label: the Archangel and the Virgin)
• San Zio Toscana Rosso IGT (on the label: the Archangel)
• Linarius Syrah Toscana Rosso IGT (on the label: the Virgin)
• Streda Vermentino Toscana IGT (on the label: the lily)

At that time, Leonardo da Vinci is a young man barely in his twenties, apprentice in Verrocchio’s workshop, and it appears that the Annunciation is one of the first commissions carried out by the Renaissance genius. The Annunciation is a masterpiece that strikes the eye for its spatial composition and the setting of the scene: Leonardo da Vinci deliberately departs from the traditional iconography of the time, placing a sacred theme such as the announcement of Christ’s birth in a naturalistic and earthly setting. The landscape is not painted following the typical fifteenth-century geometric perspective, but recedes perspectivally towards the background through subtle colour gradations amongst the contours of mountains, the river and a city glimpsed among the meticulously rendered trees.

Leonardo da Vinci set the Annunciation in an enclosed garden, a medieval outdoor setting typical for monasteries and convents of the period.

The Villa Da Vinci Collection comprises four wines (three reds and a white) that display on their labels some of the principal founding elements of the work: the Archangel Gabriel, the Virgin and the lily flower, a symbol of purity and chastity.

Beyond the sfumato tones so dear to the artist, which are discernible in the background, the drapery of the Archangel and Virgin’s garments are particularly refined and studied in their ample, soft folds, which delineate the plasticity of the depicted figures and place them realistically within the scene. Another highly realistic detail is the transparent veil that hangs over the lectern beneath the book of Sacred Scriptures that Mary is reading. Nothing is left to chance and everything is rendered with meticulous attention, as in the decorative classical elements of the lectern: from Ionic scrolls, to the festoon with fruit leaves, to the shell—a symbol of the “new Venus”, that is Mary, and of eternal beauty.