Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi
Fra Angelico
Oil on panel[?]
Uffizzi Gallery, Florence.
Source: John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, which points out that “in Florence Ruskin made a small copy of the Annunciation scene - 'its effect to me is most divine'”(L-45.212) - and began to drastically revise his views on Italian art.
“Enthusiasm for the new world of Italian Primitive art reached a climax in Florence, before Fra Angelico. He set himself to copy Angelico’s Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi, though he knew he would never be able to capture the jewel-like quality of the surface: ‘The whole background is solid with gold, so wrought up with actual sculpture that he gets real light, not fictitious, but actual light, to play wherever he wants’ (L45.102). If Turner was the master of light in the natural world, here was the symbolic expression of the light within men’s souls.” — Hewison
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