Annunciatory Angel, c.1450/55 (Guido di Pietro) Fra Angelico (c.1395-1455)

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 (Guido di Pietro) Fra Angelico 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 Annunciatory Angel is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

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.

Gold seems to hum behind him, not as a backdrop so much as a kind of silence made visible. Fra Angelico gives the angel a profile as clear as a cameo, the pale face set against the burnished field, and suddenly this celestial messenger feels very near indeed.

Look at how the wings are built: a scalloped rhythm of deep, inky purples and warm ochres, like feathers caught mid-turn. The paint is smooth, almost breath-held, but the surface is far from plain. Those fine, incised lines scratched into the gold catch light in tiny flickers, as if the air itself has a grain. One detail I keep coming back to is the halo: its ring is punched with minute dots and patterns, so meticulous you can almost hear the soft tap of the tool that made them.

This panel, Annunciatory Angel, belongs to a pair. It once sat to one side of a larger altarpiece, facing the Virgin on the opposite wing. Knowing that changes the experience. The raised right hand is not a generic blessing; it is a measured, almost careful gesture, held as though words have just landed and are still vibrating in the space between speaker and listener. Fra Angelico chooses the moment just after the announcement, when Mary’s response - on the lost companion panel - is already taking shape: acceptance, not drama.

Color does quiet work here. The robe is a tender rose, edged and banded with elaborate gold that reads like embroidery translated into paint. Around the neckline and cuffs, the decorative bands are packed with tiny, repeating figures and motifs, more suggested than spelled out, a reminder that devotion in the fifteenth century often lived in ornament. Compared with the new, rational spaces Masaccio was opening up a few decades earlier, this feels deliberately timeless: no architecture, no depth, only presence.

Perhaps that is the point. Standing in front of it at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, one might imagine the hush of a chapel - candle-warm, faintly metallic - where attention narrows to a hand, a wing, a listening face. Angelico doesn’t narrate. He makes room for the moment to settle.