Presentation of Mary in the Temple

Mary is easy to miss here. She is the small girl in black with long loose hair, far back in the picture, kneeling on the Temple steps with her hands raised toward the priests waiting at the top. The painter gave the foreground to the grown-ups who brought her. Joachim, her father, old and white-bearded, leans on a staff with a tasselled purse at his belt. Beside him, women in white veils join their hands in prayer, and one of them, in a green mantle, holds a string of prayer beads. That rosary belongs to the painter's own day. Dominican friars had begun founding rosary brotherhoods along the Rhine in the 1470s, and in the decades that followed they spread across Europe. The Temple itself is a Gothic hall church, its tall ribbed vaults running away into the distance.