The Annunciation
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Nothing here stays in the state it began in. Gabriel's sceptre is rock crystal, which medieval lapidaries called petrified water; the National Gallery reads that hardening as Christ's passage through death into Resurrection. His greeting is not spoken but written across the picture in gold.
Light crosses the window without breaking the glass. Mary was called fenestra coeli, window of heaven; the intact glass is the virginity. The dove comes down those beams, seven of them, one for each gift of the Spirit.
Her reply is written upside down, legible only from above, addressed to heaven, not to us.
Sources: NGA, 'Stories and Symbols in Jan van Eyck's The Annunciation' · NGA object page and 'Stories and Symbols' essay
And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
Luke 1:28 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 20,230 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.