The Annunciation by Michel Dorigny

The Annunciation by Michel Dorigny (1650s)

A crowded room

The Annunciation is usually a quiet meeting of two figures. Here the room is crowded. Gabriel kneels on the left, wings still raised, one hand stretched towards Mary. She kneels on the right at a wooden prie-dieu, one hand on her breast and the other on the open book, turning her face towards the angel and down. She wears red with a blue mantle and a golden scarf, and at her feet, at the lower right, a work basket spills its cloth.

Above them the dark room has opened. At the centre the dove of the Holy Spirit hangs in a burst of light, surrounded by the heads of winged children. Two large angels plunge in from the upper left and right in swirls of violet and red drapery, and at the top a child holds up a long ribbon. The angel on the right twists as he flies to look down at Gabriel and Mary. On the left a tall opening lets in a warmer light. The painting is in oil on canvas, 120.5 by 86 centimetres.

A Vouet for almost two hundred years

The picture came to the Uffizi in 1793. It was number 7 on a list of paintings bought by the agent Favi and entered the gallery on 4 December that year. Favi bought it as a work by Simon Vouet, First Painter to the King of France, on the written opinions of French painters including Vien, Hubert Robert and Bachelier. It kept Vouet's name until 1972.

Not everyone was pleased. Luigi Lanzi doubted that a Vouet was worth buying, and when this one arrived he found the chiaroscuro vigorous, almost in the manner of Guercino, but the actions strange, the forms coarse and the colouring untrue. Later writers who accepted it as Vouet disagreed about when he could have painted it, some placing it in his years in Rome around 1620, others after his return to France or around 1630.

Dorigny's hand

The Italian national catalogue entry for the painting sets out the evidence for the change. A preparatory drawing in the Suida Manning collection in New York is for an Annunciation in the church of Saint-Michel de Sillery in Quebec, and it is clearly related to this canvas: the flying angel who turns back towards the archangel and the Virgin appears in all three. The drawing has the hard pen line, round eyes and broken gestures typical of Michel Dorigny's drawings. Comparison with his documented paintings, such as the Pan and Syrinx in the Louvre and the canvases from Anne of Austria's apartments at Vincennes, shows the same deep dark eyes, heavy faces, bright colours and gestures less fluid than Vouet's.

Dorigny was Vouet's pupil and assistant, and his son-in-law: he entered Vouet's workshop in 1638, engraved many of his compositions, and in 1648 married his daughter Jeanne-Angélique. After Vouet's death in 1649 he worked independently in Paris, was received into the Académie royale in 1663 and died in 1665. The national catalogue dates the Annunciation broadly between 1630 and 1660; Wikidata places it in the 1650s. Some reproductions, including the Wikimedia Commons file this print was made from, still carry Vouet's name.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas, in its upright format, with the crowded sky above and the two kneeling figures below.

Sources: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali, 0900126093 (Gallerie degli Uffizi, inv. 1890 no. 1013) · Wikidata Q114241486 · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia (French and English), "Michel Dorigny" · Luke 1:26–38 (Douay-Rheims)