The Annunciation

The Annunciation came out of Verrocchio's workshop and was attributed to Leonardo only in the nineteenth century. It shows a young painter trying everything at once: a marble lectern copied from Verrocchio's tomb carvings, a meadow of separately observed flowers, and a landscape that fades into blue mountains and water.

Gabriel's wings were drawn from a bird's wings, short and strong. A later hand lengthened them. Some passages are awkward. Mary's right arm reaches oddly far to the book, a perspective problem that looks better when the panel is seen from below and to the right, as it may have been hung.

The far distance already shows what he would later write down as a rule: the farther a mountain is, the bluer and paler it becomes.