The angel Gabriel on clouds to the left, the Virgin kneeling at a lectern to the right; a niche between them. The drawing comes from the Carracci sequence (and Wittkower catalogued it as Ludovico in W(C)), but Stephen Pepper recognised Guido Reni's hand (Master Drawings, 1968, p. 374), and all subsequent scholars have accepted the attribution to Reni.

No related painting is known, but Pepper suggested a connection to the last important commission that the young Reni received in Bologna before his departure for Rome, an altarpiece of the Assumption for Pieve di Cento, which was to be furnished with statues of the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate (see Pepper in Burlington Magazine, 1969, p. 482). On the verso of a sheet in the Uffizi (inv. 1654E) are separate studies for the two figures of Gabriel and the Virgin, each in niches and posed in a similar manner to that seen here.

V. Birke, Guido Reni: Zeichnungen, Albertina 1981, no. 10.