Details Of Renaissance Paintings (Leonardo Da Vinci, The Annunciation, 1472) (F. & S. II.323)
Details Of Renaissance Paintings (Leonardo Da Vinci, The Annunciation, 1472) (F. & S. II.323)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
81 x 112cm, Edition of 60, Screenprint, 1984
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Meaning & Analysis
Details of Renaissance Paintings (Leonardo da Vinci, The Annunciation, 1472) (F. & S. II.323) is a screenprint made in 1984, part of Warhol's Renaissance Paintings series. It isolates the central landscape from Leonardo's 1472 Annunciation – the mountain, flanking cypress trees, and pale arcade – with the figures reduced to fragmentary hands at the lower edges. Signed and numbered from an edition of 60.
The Renaissance Paintings series represents one of Warhol's most considered engagements with art history. Rather than reproducing canonical works wholesale, he extracted and amplified specific passages, disrupting the way centuries of reproduction had made these images invisible through familiarity.
This print takes the background of Leonardo's Annunciation: the peaked mountain, cypress trees, the gridded arcade at right. The figures themselves are almost absent – only a hand at lower left holding a lily stem, and a hand at lower right resting on draped fabric remain, cropped from the composition's margins. The psychological encounter between angel and Virgin is replaced by landscape, architecture, and geometry.
Warhol's palette does the rest. What was Leonardo's carefully modulated sfumato becomes hot pink and acid green, the sky a flat slate-blue, the architecture a grid of chartreuse. The mountain glows like neon. The spatial recession of Renaissance perspective survives in the composition, but its atmosphere is entirely replaced – the quattrocento seen through 1984 New York.
