Announcing Angel

This is the final model for the Angel of the Toeplitz Annunciation. Andreotti worked on this artwork – as proven by a letter he sent to Aldo Carpi on June 28, 1931 – at the end of the academic year busy with exams: “I hope I will be able to work steadily on an Annunciation for the Toeplitz: two figures 1m 55 tall that I wish to realize”. On October 21, 1931 the financier Ludovico Toeplitz de Grand Ry, then in Florence, inspirer and recipient of the artwork, wrote to the sculptor to thank him for the statues. Since November 1930 Toeplitz had the small bronze group with Martha and Mary Magdalene on either side of the Cross in his Bellosguardo Villa; “on his suggestion” the following year Andreotti created the Annunciation, which was placed in the Villa library. The sculptor was inspired by the gothic models of the Virgin Annunciate, so that the figures have “the vibrating slenderness of the wooden medieval sculptures together with the nervous elegance of the Sienese early fifteenth-century” (Cultura Europea, 2000).

Floor:
Room: Mature Works
Year: 1931
Author: Libero Andreotti