Archangel Gabriel; The Virgin Annunciate

Gerard David

ca. 1510 · Oil on oak panel · Robert Lehman Collection

These panels once formed the inner and outer faces of polyptych wings, with the Annunciation serving as the exterior and Christ Carrying of the Cross, with the Crucifixion and The Resurrection, with the Pilgrims of Emmaus (1975.1.119A-B) the interior. Painted by Gerard David in the early years of the sixteenth century, the pictures reveal the influence of the artist’s fifteenth-century predecessors on his compositional style and palette. Although it is possible that the wings once flanked a single painted panel component, thus forming a triptych, it is also conceivable that they could have been elements of a more complex multimedia altarpiece with carved sections surrounded by two-dimensional painted panels. The Lehman wings were, possibly very early in their existence, linked to a painting of the Lamentation that was also created in the David workshop and which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Artist

Gerard David

Date

ca. 1510

Medium

Oil on oak panel

Department

Robert Lehman Collection

Credit line

Robert Lehman Collection, 1975