Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate

For hundreds of years this quiet meeting of two elderly people was how European art pictured one of its most disputed ideas. The story, told in medieval legend, has Joachim and Anne, long childless, each visited by an angel with news that they will have a child. They hurry to meet at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, and their embrace there was taken to mark the moment Mary was conceived, free from the stain that theology said every other child inherited. In 1512, when Fries painted this, that claim was still fiercely argued between the religious orders and would not be settled Church teaching for centuries. He gives the argument no drama. Two old people meet at a city gate and hold each other, watched by figures in the everyday dress of his own Swiss towns.