The Doria picture treats the customary theme of the Annunciation with a slightly unusual iconography, in that the angel arrives from the right, rather than, as normally happens, from the left. This device was adopted by the painter to enable him to use a natural light source coming from the left, rather than an artificial one from outside the picture.

The “Annunciation” displays all the experienced technical and compositional ability of the mature Lippi, heir and protagonist of the achievements of Renaissance Florence. The complex architectural setting, based on the straight lines of the finto marmo floor and the solid frame of the spatial prospect, has its roots in the work of Filippo Brunelleschi and the Beato Angelico, as has the use of the very clear sun-light which fixes the scene. The result is that typically Tuscan “light picture”, embodied also in the contemporary works of Domenico Veneziano.

The colours which are vivid and also delicately toned are peculiar to Filippo, as is the
line of the border, which bends in musical curves, giving emphasis, with a technique worthy of Donatello, to the consistency of the solid masses. The minute decorative details, Flemish in taste, recur in many other works of Lippi.

The cloth in the background, elegantly brocaded in gold, shows a design widespread in the fabrics of the age in Tuscany, several times “quoted” in Florentine pictures of this period, alluding perhaps to the clients, merchants in, or producers of, cloth. The picture entered the Doria Pamphilj Gallery about the middle of the nineteenth century.

The panel, in excellent state of preservation, sometimes considered in the past to be work of the studio of Lippi, was finally recognized as certainly a refined work by the hand of the master, dating to between 1445 and 1450. The theme of the Annunciation, very frequent in fifteenth-century Tuscan painting, was repeated several times by the painter, as in the panels in the Galleria d’Arte Antica in Rome, the Pinakothek of Munich, and in the National Gallery in London.