Madonna and Child with Saint Anne

On 30 May 1611 Orazio Lancellotti, a churchman from a Roman noble family, received permission from the city's street magistrates to restore the facade of a small church, San Simeone Profeta. Later that year he was made a cardinal. The museum thinks he ordered this altarpiece from Carlo Saraceni in the same months, for the first chapel on the right. It shows three generations together, Saint Anne, her daughter Mary and the Christ Child. Saraceni slips in an unexpected household moment. Anne holds the dove of the Holy Spirit up out of reach, most likely taken from the boy to save it from his games, and the Child grabs at his grandmother's dress. The museum calls the scene domestic tenderness at the very edge of theological irreverence. Anne herself is plain and heavy, an ordinary old woman. At her feet a cradle is heaped with white swaddling bands, painted so thickly that the cloth seems to have weight, and the museum links them to an old image of Anne as the one who wove the flesh in which Mary wrapped her son. The canvas came to the national gallery in 1939, when part of the church was pulled down.