Birth of the Virgin

By 1512, when Fries painted this panel, workshops across the Alps had settled on one way to show the birth of the Virgin. They set it in an ordinary lying-in room of their own century, and that is what you see here. Anne rests after the birth while women move about the chamber, food is carried in, and the newborn who will become Mary is washed and tended by attendants dressed like the servants of any prosperous Swiss household. Nothing in the room tells you this child matters. The scene belongs to the outside of a large winged altarpiece Fries made that year on the Virgin's early life. With the wings closed, this crowded bedchamber was among the first things a worshipper standing before the altar would have seen.