MANTUA, Italy — In 1972, Gerhard Richter represented West Germany at the Venice Biennale and presented one of his most renowned series of paintings: “48 Portraits,” which depict famous and forgotten white men in blurry, pallid black and white. While in Venice that summer, he went to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he came upon a painting by Titian from around 1539. It was a small, foamy scene of the Annunciation, hiding in plain sight amid the Scuola’s dozens of more dramatic works by Tintoretto. Titian paints Mary crouched to the right of the composition, her eyes cast down and her hand clasped over her breast. The archangel wafts in from the left on a cloud of smoke, wearing a tunic of lustrous magenta, spreading his wings of steely gray as he delivers the big news.
Mr. Richter bought a postcard. The next year, back in his spotless German studio, he started to repaint the Titian — the first and only time he copied a work of art history. His “Annunciation After Titian” (1973) represents the same dramatic announcement of the Incarnation, but Titian’s already soft brush strokes have deliquesced into an even blur. The cloud beneath Gabriel that Titian depicted as smoke has turned an impalpable white, while the column and pediment to Mary’s right have vanished into fuzziness. Four other “Annunciations After Titian” from that year are blurrier still, the last of them evaporating into a nearly monochrome cloud of pink.