The Annunciation

Van Eyck painted this panel in the mid-1430s, during his mature period in Bruges in the service of Philip the Duke of Burgundy, when he had already completed the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and was consolidating the technical revolution he had helped engineer in northern European painting. The work belongs to the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which acquired it in 1941 from Andrew Mellon's bequest; it is one of the very few autograph van Eycks in the Western Hemisphere. Its significance within art history rests on van Eyck's synthesis of theological symbolism and empirical observation: the Romanesque church architecture alludes to the Old Testament dispensation giving way to the new, while the upper register of Romanesque arches contrasts with Gothic windows above: a carefully constructed typological argument in stone and light. His use of oil glazing, building luminosity through successive transparent layers, allowed a tonal range and a saturation of jewel colors that tempera could not approach, and it established the northern oil technique as the dominant medium of European painting for the next four centuries.