#65 The Annunciation — Mug

The whole painting is the gap between them. The angel has just landed, still low to the ground, one hand raised; Mary bends away with her hand out, and their fingers almost meet across an empty tiled floor and do not. Botticelli painted the perspective lines of that floor to run straight between the two of them, so the emptiness is the most carefully constructed part of the picture. Everything is happening in the space where nothing is. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.