The Virgin and Child with St Anne

Entry

St Anne sits on a throne, facing forward, with a half-open book in a pouch in her left hand. Her right hand rests caressingly on the back of her daughter’s head; the Virgin sits obliquely in front of her with the naked Christ child on her lap. The baby makes an impudent grab for his grandmother’s book. St Anne is depicted as an elderly woman and wears the usual headdress and chin-band. There are small holes in the women’s heads, where crowns or haloes, now lost, would have been attached.

This group, the iconography of which is also referred to as St Anne Trinity (in Dutch St. Anna-te-Drieën), was long regarded as a Southern Netherlandish work from the second half of the fifteenth century.¹ However, the small size, St Anne’s stiff posture and the thickset, rather hard design of the piece as a whole led Leeuwenberg to place the group in the Northern Netherlands, more specifically in the County of Holland, and to date it to the early sixteenth century.² The mischievous action of the grasping Christ can be regarded as a further indication of a Northern Netherlandish origin.³ A piece that makes the difference from the woodcarving of the Southern Netherlands evident at a glance, is a contemporaneous Virgin and Child with St Anne in Museum Mayer van den Bergh, which is similar in construction, but larger and more refined.⁴ Here the infant Christ holds out his hand to his grandmother with restraint. It is also striking that the St Anne in this Brussels group is depicted at a considerably younger age. This would become increasingly common in the South as the sixteenth century progressed.

Stylistically the group in the Rijksmuseum can be best compared to two Utrecht versions of the Virgin and Child with St Anne in Museum Catharijneconvent. They even show a nearly identical composition to the group in the Rijksmuseum, but in mirror image.⁵ Compositions of this group with high-backed thrones are regarded as typical of Utrecht work. It is not possible to ascertain how high the back of the Rijksmuseum example originally was because the protruding part has been sawn off, but the great affinity with the two Utrecht groups is a strong indication it was also made in this city. Defoer places the two sculptures of St Anne Trinity in Museum Catharijneconvent in a group of Utrecht carvings of a rather conservative style, made up of a small devotional relief of the Nativity, an retable group of the Adoration, all in Museum Catharijneconvent, and a Flight into Egypt in the Rijksmuseum (BK-NM-11769).⁶ The nearly identical facial type of the Virgin in the Adoration and the same figure in the present carving confirms the latter belongs to this Utrecht style group as well.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024