For once in his life, Lotto breaks with symmetry. Reading naturally from left to right, then, one's eye runs into Mary before the angel Gabriel and the room behind him. In other words, one hits the effect before the cause, the sacred form in hiding before the unhidden world. Even here, however, Lotto will not let go of his dreamers. Mary crouches, unable to act.
Lotto displaces any overt action or emotion onto a cat, striding in the dead center of the canvas.
With the cat, the painter's emotional reserve and complexity has its greatest triumph. Curled in a ball, she made me think of a mouse, and in art a cat sometimes symbolizes the devil. I could not stop there, either. From her crouch, I imagined her ready to spring like the cat after all. And still she stares at nothing, with the inner retreat of another Lotto recluse.