The Holy Kinship

A late medieval legend held that Saint Anne married three times and had a daughter named Mary by each husband. The daughters' children counted as Christ's cousins, and several of them grew up to be apostles. This panel, from the workshop of Geertgen tot Sint Jans in Haarlem around 1495, gathers that whole clan inside a church. The Dutch name for the subject, heilige maagschap, comes from an old word for a blood relative.

The small boys playing on the floor before the altar are the future apostles Simon, James and John. Another child reaches up with a long pole to light a candle on the choir screen, and the museum names him as Judas Thaddeus, one more apostle to be. The boys' fathers, Alphaeus and Zebedee, stand near the altar with Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist. At Anne's feet sits a small wicker basket of fruit.