Saint Anne teaching the Virgin to read

In 1794, when royal officials went through the palace at Aranjuez room by room, they found this canvas hanging in the schoolroom of the infantas, the king's daughters. The picture is itself a lesson. Saint Anne has set aside her sewing and is showing the child Mary a book. The story comes from apocryphal accounts of the Virgin's childhood, and painters in Seville returned to it constantly. Murillo, around 1655, folded three worlds into one space. The ordinary one of a mother teaching her daughter, with the workbasket in the foreground painted as a small still life. An architecture of columns and balustrades that puts the pair somewhere not domestic at all. And a break of glory overhead, from which two angels descend with a crown of flowers for the girl. Before Aranjuez the canvas had hung in Queen Isabel de Farnesio's dining room at La Granja, valued in her inventory at seven thousand reales.