Vatican Museums

This precious silk fragment is the remnant of an important sumptuary item, decorated with religious figures linked by stylised palmettes. A portion is conserved with two identical compositions, depicting the Annunciation, between overlapping and knotted rotae. This and fragment cat. 61258 probably constituted a single cloth, found alongside similar specimens in the Chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace (1905). The iconographic codification of the episode, influenced by oriental pictorial models, closely follows the narrative of the Apocryphal Gospels which, more than the canonical testimony of Luke (I, 26-38) provided the artist with details of the setting that could be translated into images. Both the late Hellenistic derivation of the scene and the type of production of these adornments indicate a possible Syrian elaboration of the original iconographic motif.