SANDRO BOTTICELLI |

Annunciazione di Cestello e Cristo in Pietà |

Uffizi, Sala 10-14 |

Versione integrale | La narrazione è di Fabiana Bianchini, la voce di Maria Paiato |

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Sandro Botticelli | The Cestello Annunciation and Pietà | Room 10-14

The hands are suspended in space, as if waiting. The angel has just arrived. A puff of wind passes through his light veil. Like conception, like life: a gasp, a breath. He kneels, a hand outstretched towards Mary to reassure her. Distracted from her reading, the Virgin almost turns upon herself; her gaze is turned inwards, as if listening to the heartbeat. One hand says “wait”, the other is level with her heart. It takes time to take in a piece of news. The announcement changes the Virgin: life changes with a child.

The life growing inside you brings immense emotions with it. You are no longer alone; there’s someone living in your womb, the perfect home. When I was expecting my daughter, she lived perfectly inside me and had everything she needed through me. Wait! I’m not ready! Perhaps I am enough for you now, but later, when I am no longer your perfect dwelling place? What will become of us? Wait!

One needs time to understand, to accept. Mary accepts her son, and her pain too, as foreshadowed in the Pietà in the bottom of the frame. It is difficult to accept what can be taken away.

Here, where the angel has just landed, we find ourselves in the shelter of a home. Gabriel, silhouetted against the door, is somehow outside Mary’s domestic space; at the same time, by bursting into the house, he brings God’s breath into a human space.

Mary’s womb contains divine life and breath; it is a perfect home, but with time it will inevitably become too small. Perhaps we are all seeking the perfect home, but all the places where we live push us out at some point.

Behind the angel there is a door, with glimpses of a walled garden – a reference to Mary’s purity – and a magnificent view. Botticelli has painted a young tree in the middle. Some experts think it is an ash: a Marian plant, lethal to snakes like the Virgin is lethal to the devil. Other academics see it as an oak. I like to think it is. Its roots can emerge from the soil and re-enter it in more distant places, drawing ever more strength.

Botticelli painted this Annunciation during a religious crisis triggered by the preaching in Florence of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who played a leading role in establishing the Republic in 1494. His sermons profoundly affected the artist who for years had been the leading exponent of the neo-Platonic culture promoted by the Medici family. Here, in this austere space, the figures of Mary and the angel are animated by a spiritual tension not found in Botticelli’s previous work.

The painting, which had originally been painted for the Church of Cestello, arrived in the Uffizi in 1872.

That same Gallery is where I began to work as a museum guard in 1986. But I didn’t look at the artworks; I was too much in pain. I really became aware of the Cestello Annunciation when I was asked to choose a painting. I felt something in those hands, which Mary holds as if protecting her heart. The baby’s heart, the first thing detected in a scan. It’s the only thing you see, a breath, a beat... That is why I chose this painting, or it chose me, because after all, it is artworks that reflect our emotions, they resemble us, and call on us to weave our stories with theirs.

#12 breve | Luca Signorelli, Sacra Famiglia