Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child (The Holy Kinship)

Saint Anne holds an open Book of Scriptures on her lap with her left hand; she is seated on a throne which is now in part fragmentary. She wears a robe with a high neckline which would originally have been broadly belted below the bust. An ample cloak covers her head and shoulders, and her wimple reveals only her face. With her right arm, which is partly lost, she embraces the Virgin, who sits on a stool placed at her feet. Saint Anne’s right hand rests on her daughter’s shoulder, which is covered by a veil. Mary holds the Christ Child on her lap; he wears a shirt which is open at the collar, its sleeves rolled up. The Child is represented as restless, in contrast with the tranquil demeanour of the two Holy Women.

The current appearance of this group differs markedly from its original appearance. The sculpture has clearly been cut across its entire lower part, removing the feet of the two female figures as well as the end of their drapery as it falls to the ground. This intervention, no doubt relatively recent, must have been prompted by the poor condition of these parts. As was traditionally the case for wooden works of this size, the figure group is hollowed out at the back to prevent the wood from splitting. This cavity would originally have been concealed by the high back of Saint Anne’s throne, which is now lost. To judge by the Virgin’s attentively-carved stool, one can imagine that the throne of her mother also contributed to the precious quality of the statue. Moreover, the missing part must have included the right arm of Saint Anne, of which there survives only the hand on the shoulder of the Virgin. The quasi-monochrome of the sculpture is also different from the original appearance of the work. While the flesh tones and faces have retained traces of original polychromy, the clothing of the three figures, the stool of the Virgin and the side of Saint Anne’s throne, visible on the right side—are entirely covered with white pigment, added later ¹.  Originally, this white colouring was probably only present on Anne’s wimple, perhaps on part of the Virgin’s veil and on the Child’s shirt.

Our sculpture, formerly in the Thyssen collection, was related by Michael Maek-Gérard to a figure group in the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht attributed to the Brabant school of about 1500.² However, as the scholar recognised, this comparison only applied to the possible style of the saint’s throne and the arrangement of the three figures, with Mary seated on a stool at her mother’s knee.

Indeed, the Thyssen group is clearly distinct from traditional Brabant sculpture, given its monumental character and plastic qualities. In addition, the faces of the two Holy Women are marked by a special sensitivity: each has its individuality, beyond the obvious familiarity. Mother and daughter share the same type of elongated, slightly triangular face, marked by a somewhat long nose and a thin mouth, and very subtly modelled eyes under finely drawn eyebrows.

As Maek-Gérard rightly pointed out, everything here leads us back to the style of painting in Bruges at the end of the fifteenth century.³ For instance, we may note a particularly close arrangement of figures in the Holy Kinship panel painted in the workshop of Gerard David between 1490 and 1500 and now housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.⁴

It is mainly to Hans Memling that our group seems to be most indebted. Maek-Gérard suggested that the pose of the Child’s legs was an iteration in reverse of what we see in the Virgin and Child in the central panel of the Portinari triptych, painted by Memling in 1487 and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.⁵ Above all, he underlines the close commonality of spirit between the two women in the statue formerly in the Thyssen collection and the figures of saints executed by the painter. A number of aspects of these two figures directly echo the work of Memling: the style of the faces, in particular the description of eyes with delicately applied dark circles; the treatment of drapery; and most of all the impression of isolation and profound silence that marks the faces and attitudes of the two women who, apart from their physical proximity, do not give the impression of any interaction.

These various connections enable us to propose that the sculpture formerly in the Thyssen collection was created in Bruges in the period 1480–1500; yet we should emphasise that this transposition of Memling’s style and spirit into statuary art appears to be most exceptional, apparently without a true equivalent in Flemish sculpture from the end of the fifteenth century.