The Angel's Message to Joachim

The story of Mary begins with her father. Joachim, a wealthy man, had been turned away from the Temple because he and his wife Anne had no child, and he went off to his shepherds in the hills. An angel finds him out there and tells him that Anne will bear a daughter. The painter puts the old legend into his own countryside, with a castle and a tall tower on the hilltop, a straw hat slung on Joachim's back, grazing sheep and a dog nosing the grass. The angel points upward as he speaks. The panel's modern history leads to a castle too. In 1911 Prince Johann II of Liechtenstein bought it in Regensburg and took it to his collection at Burg Seebenstein, near Wiener Neustadt. In 1922 he gave it to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.