The restoration of “The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico commented by Ana González Mozo

It's a painting that is inserted into Frangelico's own career in a very interesting but also very complex moment. It's a time of change for him. At the moment he's in contact with Alberti, with Giverti and with Brunelleschi. He's immersed in the cultural environment not only of his order but also of Florence. It's the first time he's faced with representing an announcement for his community, which was an intellectually very strong community. And at a time when not only the pictorial techniques but also the representation techniques are also changing. He finds that he has to adapt to a series of norms, both in terms of symbolic codes of how to represent the announcement and try to do it in a new space, in a new format. It's the first time that an announcement is represented in an almost square format. Frangelico is one of the painters who, on the one hand, abandons the massive golden backgrounds but uses gold in all his works. If you don't make a golden background you have to make a space. You have to project it first and then paint it. In addition, the viewer has to believe that this space is real. So, for painters it's a complication. But I think that, to a certain extent, he knows that he's very good and that he's trying to do things that no one has done before. The idea that I had, as I think that many specialists have been surprised by, is that you always think that an Italian painter from the 480s, especially a Florentine, will be much more canonical in terms of painting, drawing and painting preparation processes. Basari says that when he finished a painting, as he did for Inspiration Divina, once he finished the painting, as it was a work of God, he never retouched it. When we did the infrared reflectography, the first one we did in 2015, we realised that he hadn't only retouched it, but that he had completely changed the composition three times, the left side of the composition. We have the architectural structure, then he paints a landscape and then he does the garden. One of the first things we saw was that here there was an arch that went down here and coincided with the geometric shapes in this area. There's another arch here. In the reflectography you can hardly see it, but you can see it in the x-ray. Here he starts painting and then he does a landscape, a landscape from which we have been able to see something that looks like trunks. In the latest reflectography we have also seen how it appears that there are trunks of trees below Eva. This would mean that once he paints the garden, he is rehearsing with Eva's figure. It seems that here a first figure appears with a first foot, which are also very similar. He is already considering how to combine natural history, that is, the representation of nature, with a sacred scene, without the important characters, Gabriel and Maria, losing their prominence. In fact, what we see is that in the end the architecture does not impose itself on the characters and that the landscape of the garden on the left with Adam and Eve is so different from the architecture and the colours are so contrasted that the viewer can make a reading in two parts. He can focus on the loggia with the scene of the Annunciation and then he can go to the garden where he represents a whole series of botanical species with incredible detail. What we also see in the reflectography are not only these types of changes, but also many types of underlying drawings. We see that he has a wealth of resources, first to propose the scene, then to clarify parts that were confusing. He uses both punches of different thicknesses, which can be seen very well, as dry mediums, a brush with brown and black gouache, and then we also see that there are drawings made with other materials that do not have an infrared response, such as reds or ochres, visible on the surface, covered with a very light layer of paint. He does not have an orderly or linear work sequence. He continues to draw, each time he changes his mind, each time he has to correct, and he has already started to paint, he draws again on top of the painting, he draws by hand, and when he has already made a more or less stable composition, here the question is always raised, whether he uses a correct perspective or not. The perspective he uses is very simple, it is not a complicated perspective. In addition, the escape lines are always blocked by the main figures, so if he makes a mistake, it is not noticeable, and what we see is a design, for example, of the vault, quite exact, but that he corrects later so that the viewer believes it. It is believed that it is real, because many times this is already noticed by Verdi, and then Leonardo codifies it. When compositions are made with a very exact perspective, very mathematical, visually it does not work, and I think that at this moment he is not interested in making a mathematically correct scene. Another very interesting detail is that the sacred characters do not cast shadows. This has a lot to do with the theories of St. Thomas Aquinas, with the angels, with his theory of the movement of angels, and that angels will never cast shadows. But we do see that he does a very careful study of how light affects real objects. Once he has a more or less stable drawing, what he does is make a distribution of shadows and lights in a phase prior to painting. It is a distribution that we often see that does not follow a surface, but that in reflectography the image he gives us of shadows and lights is much more marked, much stronger. He is studying, with a precision that is not mathematical, but a perceptive precision, what shadow the capitals project on the wall and how light affects the marble of those capitals. There are no more shadows in the painting than there are in the loggia or in the furniture. The way he represents it is a kind of brilliance, and for this he uses the clearest part of the preparation. When he is painting, he begins to give this kind of sub-layer in which he distributes shadows and lights. He already knows how he wants to make his simulated light in these materials, so he leaves the part that is going to be lighter without covering it in this sub-layer and takes advantage of the reflection of the light preparation to simulate the brilliance. So we have on the one hand the white of the marble and on the other hand a medium-toned white, a little more yellowish, that comes from the preparation. At this point, as I mentioned at the beginning, there is also a change in the techniques. The temple is not enough for them and possibly we have not done agglutinant analysis, but they are destructive analyses that we have not considered doing in this case, but visually we see that the quality of the material is different. There are areas that are made to the temple, the veils, for example the red veils of the Virgin's body, are made possibly with a fat material, and then it seems that there is an emulsion, a mixture of fat and lean agglutinants, to make the whole range of greens in the garden. And then on the surface, another very interesting thing, on the part of the large amount of brushstrokes, of nuances, of scratches that it has, it has been very interesting to me, and relating it with this speed that we can see in the underlying drawing or in the underlying washes, is that it has parts that seem unfinished. We are seeing the brushstrokes at the limits of the shapes. That on the one hand, and when he has finished painting, what he does is simplify some things. One of the things we saw during the process is that the Virgin had the body decorated with flowers, which he removes, but there is a remnant of these flowers, a trace of relief. I believe that this type of elimination is aimed at simplifying a scene and focusing it on the characters. I would describe him as a very well-trained painter, technically and theoretically, with a lot of visual resources, a lot of technical resources, and also very fast. Much faster than we can imagine.