Saint Anne Polyptych

On 26 July 1508 the confraternity of Saint Anne in Vercelli, a lay brotherhood with its own oratory, signed a contract with Gaudenzio Ferrari for the altarpiece of their altar. The contract told him to take as his model an altarpiece already commissioned for another church in the city, and he delivered on 7 May 1509. It was his first work for Vercelli, and the museum sees in it what he had absorbed on a journey to Rome.

The four panels here tell the story of the Virgin's parents. Joachim is turned away from the Temple because his marriage is childless, he and Anne meet again at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, and in the centre Anne sits with the Virgin and Child, two members of the confraternity beside them. God the Father blesses from above. On either side of him, in the upper row, stood the angel Gabriel and the Virgin of the Annunciation. By 1864 those two panels belonged to Austen Henry Layard, the archaeologist who had excavated Nineveh, and he left them to the National Gallery in London. Turin bought the other four in 1865.