Oil on wood, 1495 The Holy Kinship shows the Virgin and Child in the left center with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist slightly more prominently p
Oil on wood, 1495 The Holy Kinship shows the Virgin and Child in the left center with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist slightly more prominently positioned center right. The "kinship" members have been further identified as Saint Anne with a book on the left with her husband Joachim behind her and behind him Saint Joseph holding a lily towards his wife as a gesture of the immaculate conception. Three young cousins of the infants, the later disciples Simon, Jacob and John, pour wine into a chalice in the centre of the painting which is a reference to the Eucharist, and beyond them a sculpture of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on the altar represents God's sacrifice of Jesus. A young Judas stands lighting the candles of the choir gate. In the doorways of the choir gate stand the other two former husbands of Saint Anne, the fathers of the other two Marias who are positioned behind St. Elisabeth. This painting is a former altarpiece of an unspecified church, though it is tempting to imagine similarities to the Commanderie van Sint-Jan where Geertgen is known to have lived and worked: Janskerk, Haarlem. The provenance of this painting only goes back to a Brussels sale in 1797 however, and indeed the painting was purchased in 1808 as a work by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. It wasn't until 1888 that it was identified as a work by the Haarlem master. Since then several attempts have been made to determine the origins of the painting. In his translated Schilder-boeck, Hessel Miedema reported that Geertgen died somewhere between 1486 and 1492, while recent dendrochronology, on the other hand, places the painting around 1496 at the earliest.
Size: 4515px × 5888px
Photo credit: © Viktor Birkus / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: art, child, holy, kinship, museum, oil, painting, panel, religious, renaissance, virgin, wood
