The Annunciation, c.1450/53 Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Fra Filippo Lippi also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Annunciation is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

White lilies stand in a carved vase at the centre, slender and pale, as if they alone understand the gravity of the moment. Around them a low marble wall divides garden from chamber, innocence from destiny, open air from the richly appointed interior where Mary sits. Fra Filippo Lippi makes that wall do a great deal of work. It is boundary, symbol, stage prop and Medici calling card, with the feather-and-diamond device carved just below the vase.

The Annunciation is a small drama conducted almost in whispers. Gabriel kneels on the left, his rose-pink robe pooling over the grass, and his huge peacock wings spread behind him with a courtly magnificence that is anything but rustic. Look at the dark eye-spots in the feathers: they are picked out like tiny enamelled jewels, each one insisting on ceremony. Opposite him, Mary folds inward. Her blue mantle falls in broad, weighty planes over a pink dress, and from an opening in that dress a fine golden radiance appears. Above, God’s hand emerges from a dense blue cloud, sending the dove towards her body. It is theology made visible, but Fra Filippo Lippi keeps the temperature human.

Inside Mary’s room, Florentine comfort has been raised almost to princely splendour. The bed is draped with gold-embroidered fabric, the chair resembles a throne, and the apricot and rose marble architecture has the polished confidence of Renaissance Florence. Made for the Medici palace, probably to hang over a doorway, the panel would have turned a domestic threshold into a holy one. One might imagine someone passing beneath it and feeling, if only for a second, that ordinary rooms could be interrupted by heaven.

Lippi is less severe than Fra Angelico, less crystalline in his piety; he is warmer, more interested in fabric, posture, hesitation. Mary’s bowed head is not theatrical submission. It feels like listening. Even the air seems hushed, with the faint scent of lilies and the coolness of stone underfoot. Behind Gabriel, the garden is dense with little white flowers, a hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden long associated with Mary’s virginity. Yet it also feels oddly real, like a shaded corner after rain.

Across the arched top, the composition bends gently around the panel’s shape. Nothing quite rushes. Gabriel’s message travels, the dove advances, Mary receives. Fra Filippo Lippi has painted a miracle as an event of immense quietness, and that quietness is what remains with us.