The Annunciation by Joos van Cleve

Joos van Cleve - The Annunciation - ca. 1525 - Oil on panel, 86 x 80 cm - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Netherlandish painter Joos van Cleve (ca. 1480-1540) is known for his portraits of royalty and his religious paintings. He is now often identified with the “Master of the Death of the Virgin” although that isn’t our particular theme for the period of Advent (a season observed in many Christian churches as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus). Joos’ work is facile, eclectic and conservative, and he generally altered his style only to agree with the changes in fashion. Nevertheless, he was a fine painter and a successful one. He entered the Antwerp guild as a master painter, and in 1520 he was appointed its dean. He received a number of commissions from Cologne, where he influenced the local school of painting.  

Joos’ painting of the Annunciation takes place in a fully furnished, sixteenth century bedchamber. There is a bed, a prie-dieu, a chair, a dresser, a sconce, a pewter dish and jug, a stone vase, a cloth, and a chandelier. Netherlandish painters had a remarkable ability to render works in extraordinary detail, without making the overall scene appear cluttered or overdone.

Here is the Met’s description of this exquisite painting:

Gabriel and Mary are presented within an elaborately furnished interior that would have been familiar to sixteenth-century viewers. However, most of the objects, arranged unobtrusively within the room, carry symbolic meaning. The altarpiece and the woodcut on the wall, for example, show Old Testament prophets as prefigurations of New Testament themes. Influenced by Italian art, Joos appropriated a new canon of beauty, a new repertory of rhetorical gesture, and a striking grace of movement in his figures.