Leonardo was around twenty when he painted the Annunciation that now hangs in the Uffizi, and in the same years he had worked, as an apprentice, on the Baptism of Christ by his master, Andrea del Verrocchio. The two panels are in the same room, room A35, devoted to Leonardo, a few metres apart.
You don’t often get to see with your own eyes the passage from apprentice to master, and here all it takes is crossing a room: on one side the workshop panel in which his hand can be recognised in an angel and a landscape, on the other the earliest independent panel of his that we know.
The Uffizi closes on Mondays and entry runs on timed slots: keep that in mind when you book the train.
And the Virgin’s arm in the Annunciation, which looks too long: a youthful mistake or a calculation?
Who painted the angel in the Baptism
The question everyone asks in front of this panel is which part is Leonardo’s. The answer that circulates in schools is too neat, and the museum’s own record is far more cautious.
The standard version says: Leonardo painted the angel on the left, the one kneeling in profile and holding Christ’s robes, and Verrocchio, seeing it, realised he had been surpassed. The source is Vasari, writing three quarters of a century later with a taste for the exemplary anecdote.
Today’s scholarship credits him with far more: the river landscape in the background, the golden light running through it, part of the figure of Christ. And it adds a complication the anecdote doesn’t like: an older third painter probably worked on the panel too, because some passages are less finished than the rest.
So this isn’t Verrocchio’s picture with a Leonardo angel added in. It’s the picture of a workshop, where the master sets the composition and the apprentices execute the secondary parts, and where at least three hands can be told apart.
Two techniques on the same surface
Why can you argue over who painted what on this panel, when you can’t on others? Because of a fact written into the catalogue record.
The panel is registered as tempera and oil on panel. These are two different techniques coexisting on the same surface: tempera, quick and opaque, the traditional Florentine technique, and oil, slow, transparent, letting you layer glazes and get soft transitions. You can see the boundary between the two with the naked eye, if you know where to look: the oil passages lack tempera’s crisp outlines, and the air around the left-hand angel and the background landscape are blurred in a way the rest of the panel isn’t.
It’s this technical fact that turns the attribution into an argument rather than an opinion: whoever painted in oil didn’t work the way whoever painted in tempera did.
The Annunciation: the panel that arrived under another name
Now cross the room. Why is this panel more than twice as wide as it is tall? Because 222 by 90 centimetres aren’t the proportions of an altarpiece, they’re the proportions of a frieze, and they tell you this picture was designed for a specific spot inside a church. It reached the Uffizi in 1867, from San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, outside Porta San Frediano.
When it arrived, it was catalogued as the work of Domenico Ghirlandaio. Two years later, in 1869, the German scholar Karl Eduard von Liphart recognised it as an early work by Leonardo, but the two most authoritative connoisseurs of the century, Giovanni Morelli and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, didn’t follow him and went on thinking of Ghirlandaio or Lorenzo di Credi. The doubts were settled by two preparatory drawings, one in Oxford and one at the Louvre, that document Leonardo’s work on the panel. Today the prevailing reading is that it grew out of collaboration between Verrocchio’s workshop and Leonardo, and that it is, regardless, the earliest independent panel of his that survives.
Look at the angel Gabriel, kneeling on the grass with a lily in hand. His wings aren’t the conventional wings of a polyptych: they’re a bird’s wings studied from life, and they were originally shorter. A later hand lengthened them by painting over them, and the shape you see today is no longer the one Leonardo had observed.
The lectern copied from a tomb
There’s an object in this panel that Leonardo did not invent.
The lectern in front of the Virgin, that marble stand with lion’s-paw feet and spiralling scrolls, repeats the decorative motifs of the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’ Medici, which Verrocchio had carved for the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, a quarter of an hour’s walk from here.
That borrowing tells you how a workshop operated. The apprentice doesn’t copy an antique model or a school drawing: he copies a job his own master has just finished, and drops it into his own picture the way a cabinetmaker would reuse a piece he already had in stock.
The too-long arm, and the theory that explains it
Now look at the Virgin’s right arm, the one stretched toward the book. It’s too long. Her legs, under the drapery, look short against her torso.
For decades these flaws looked like proof that the panel was the work of a beginner, and they weighed on the doubts about its attribution. Then came the more elegant explanation, put forward by Antonio Natali, a former director of the Uffizi: the picture wasn’t meant to be seen head-on.
Step to the right and crouch down, looking at the panel obliquely and from below, and the distortions shrink and the arm falls back into place. A wide, low panel like this one was probably placed above a side altar, where nobody stands square in front of it. If the theory is right, that arm isn’t a young painter’s mistake: it’s an optical correction calculated for the real viewing point.
Warning: today the panel hangs in a museum room, at eye level and flat on the wall, which is exactly the position it wasn’t made for. Stepping to one side is the only way left to see it as the person who commissioned it did.
Practical information
Facts checked on 10 September 2026 on the official website of the Uffizi Galleries and the official CoopCulture ticket office. Prices and hours change: check again before you go.
Where they are. Both panels hang in room A35, Leonardo da Vinci, on the second floor. The Annunciation measures 90 by 222 centimetres, the Baptism of Christ 177 by 151.
Tickets. A full-price ticket bought on the day at the counter costs 25 euros, and the same ticket booked ahead costs 29 euros, because the booking fee is added to the price. Since 1 January 2026 the afternoon rate is 16 euros for entries from 16:00 onward. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is reserved for EU citizens aged 18 to 25.
Hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday, 8:15-18:30, with last entry at 17:30, and stays closed on Mondays, 1 January and 25 December.
Free entry. Admission is free for under-18s, for visitors with disabilities and one companion, with an ICOM card and for licensed tour guides. On the first Sunday of the month entry is free for everyone, and on those days you can’t book ahead.
Booking. You can book at tickets.uffizi.it, or by phone at 800 615 615 from Italy and +39 055 0354135 from abroad.
A tip on the order. Look at the Baptism first and the Annunciation second, even if the route presents them the other way round: the two panels make sense in chronological order, and the second one only clicks once you’ve seen where it came from.
How much time it takes. Half an hour for both panels, if you step to one side in front of the Annunciation as described above. Three hours for the route that reaches here starting from the Trecento.
The rest of the Uffizi, and the rest of Verrocchio
Room A35 comes just before A38, where Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo hangs, and the same floor holds Botticelli’s two panels, the Primavera and the Birth of Venus. At the start of the route, in room A8, is The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello; on the first floor, Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The list of the ten must-see works is in Uffizi Gallery: masterpieces to see.
For Verrocchio the sculptor, which was the trade he was famous for in his lifetime, the place to go is the Bargello Museum, which holds his bronze David; the Incredulity of Saint Thomas he cast in bronze for an outdoor niche is now in the Orsanmichele museum. For Leonardo, the five things worth knowing before you go looking for him in museums are told in 5 things to know about Leonardo da Vinci.
Photo credits: room A35 is by Fabrizio Garrisi (CC0); the detail of the two angels is by Francesco Bini and the detail of the angel Gabriel is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. The full reproductions of both panels are in the public domain. All from Wikimedia Commons.
