Bernardo Cavallino was one of the most refined and poetic painters working in seventeenth-century Naples. However, very little is known about him due to a scarcity of documentary evidence. The Virgin Annunciate dates to Cavallino’s mature period in the second half of the 1640s. It would originally have been paired in an altarpiece with a painting of the Archangel Gabriel (now lost). The ray of light illuminating the Virgin’s face represents the Holy Spirit at the moment of Incarnation, when the Son of God was miraculously conceived as man. This dramatic lighting indicates Cavallino’s close artistic association with Caravaggio, Massimo Stanzione and Artemisia Gentileschi.