The Annunciation with Saint Francis and Saint Louis of Toulouse [four panels]

Cosmè Tura

National Gallery of Art

Four vertical panels each have a painted frame and is occupied by a single person in a shared landscape that stretches across all four panels in this horizontal painting. The people have pale skin and delicate gold lines indicating halos encircling their heads. The person on the far left has his brown hair cut into a ring around his head, and his cleanshaven face is deeply lined. His body is angled slightly to our right, but he turns his head back to the left look at us from the corners of his drooping, heavy-lidded brown eyes. His hooded brown robe is tied at the waist with a rope, and he is barefoot. He holds a black book in his left hand and braces a thin gold cross with his other. There are red wounds on the back of both hands, both feet, and over his right ribs. In the next panel, a person with curly blond hair wears a deep pink cloak over a forest-green robe. The person faces our right in profile, the curly hair lifted off the back of the neck. Dark green, almost black, wings extend from between the shoulder blades. One hand is held up with the first two fingers extended, and the other holds a stem with a white lily. Next, a blond woman stands facing us, wearing a long, topaz-blue robe over a raspberry-pink dress. Her head turns to our left and she looks down, one hand raised with first two fingers and thumb lifted and the other bracing the edge of a book against her body. On the far right, a person wears a white mitre, a tall, white hat split into two petal-like shapes, and a dark pink robe lined with hunter green over a golden-yellow garment. He holds a long staff topped with a curling top end in one hand, and the other hand is raised, also with the thumb and two fingers extended. They all stand on rocky ground with low, rocky hills in the distance under a blue sky. The frames around each person appear to have been painted as arches at some point over or in addition to the frames around each. Those frames continue the landscape but in darker tones, and they darken to almost black along the tops. It is hard to tell whether four wood panels were joined to make this one painting or if one panel was painted to look like several, though the latter seems more likely.