Saint Joachim Reading

The words on the page are the heart of this picture. Joachim, the father of the Virgin Mary, bends over an open book, and Michaelina Wautier lettered its text clearly enough to be read. In Latin it says that the name Joachim means preparation of the Lord. Underneath she names the source, Saint Epiphanius, a 4th-century bishop in Cyprus, and a text in praise of the Blessed Virgin that went under his name.

So the old man is reading about himself, about the meaning of his own name, which pointed forward to the daughter he would have and the child she would bear. A viewer in Brussels around 1655 who knew some Latin could follow that at a glance. The painting was made as a pair with her Saint Joseph, the other elderly man in Mary's family, and both came to Vienna with the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Wautier painted Joachim more than once. Another canvas of him, which once hung as an oval above a door in the Vienna Stallburg, is also in this museum.