Leonardo painted this when he was about 20, still in Verrocchio's workshop, and already doing things no one had done before.
Look at the background: the trees are not decorative pattern — they are trees, disappearing into atmospheric haze.
The harbour beyond dissolves into misty distance.
This atmospheric perspective — objects losing definition and colour with distance — is Leonardo's own invention, and he deploys it here for the first time.
There is a known error in the painting: the angel's arm is too short for the perspective to work if Mary is at the implied distance from the viewer.
But stand back far enough and you don't notice it.
Leonardo corrected the same type of spatial inconsistency in every painting he made afterward.
He spent the rest of his life solving problems he identified in this one.
Fun fact: for decades this painting was attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio and then to Lorenzo di Credi.
It was only confidently attributed to Leonardo in the 1860s — nearly 400 years after he painted it.
The argument continued into the 20th century.
The consensus is now firm: the landscape is unmistakably his.
