The Angel of the Annunciation,
oil on panel, 203 x 69 cm, framed 

Provenance:
with Galerie Litybur, Paris;
sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 5 December 1961, lot 46 (as Hans Baldung Grien);
Private collection, Upper Austria

Literature:
A. Stange, Ein unbekannter Hans Baldung Grien, in: Die Weltkunst, XXXI no. 19a, 10 October 1961, pp. 25–26 (as Hans Baldung);
G. von der Osten, Hans Baldung Grien, Berlin 1983, under no. XV 129 (as ‘Verschollen. Nicht von Baldung‘)

The present panel depicts a life-size Archangel Gabriel blessing with his right hand and holding a sceptre in the other entwined with a banderole, conveying the words spoken by him to the Virgin Mary: ‘Ave Maria Gracia plena’. Despite the impaired condition of the spruce panel, the high-quality character of the prevalent preparatory underdrawing was enough to convince Alfred Stange in his 1961 expertise that the painting was a masterpiece by the German Renaissance master, Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85–1545), displaying his grandiose creative ability and the breadth of his talent. Indeed, although the attribution to Baldung may no longer hold (see von der Osten in literature), the appearance of Gabriel is undoubtedly Dürerian, notably how closely the present Archangel relates to a woodcut of the Annunciation (1500–1502) from the Life of the Virgin series, begun by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) just after 1500 and completed 1510/11 (see fig. 1). Aside from the strikingly similar positioning of the Archangel, the manifestation of God the Father from a bed of heavenly clouds in the Dürer woodcut offers a glimpse into the intentions of the artist for the present panel. Although the panel has lost some of its surface, the preparatory drawing is partly revealed beneath.

The motif of the Christ Child carrying the cross in the upper left of the composition is also a unique feature that seldom appeared in the art of the period. The motif appears in sculptural form in a relief of the Annunciation by Michael Pacher (circa 1435–1498) taken from the winged Altar of the Coronation of the Virgin (1471/75) in the Old Parish Church of Gries in Bolzano, South Tyrol; and again in two further pictorial examples: the exterior wing of the altar in the church of San Mauro di Pinè, Trentino (circa 1514/16), and in the exterior wing of the high altar in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, Lavant, East Tyrol (circa 1508). It can therefore be assumed that the present painter may have been familiar with such a motif.