The Presentation of Mary in the Temple

When an unnamed Viennese painter made this narrow panel in the early 1500s, the feast it shows was still fairly new in the West. Pope Sixtus IV had extended the Presentation of Mary to the whole Western Church only in 1472, and in 1568 it would be struck from the calendar for a time. The story comes from an early apocryphal gospel, outside the Bible, which tells how her parents brought Mary to the Temple in Jerusalem when she was three. Here she climbs the steep stairs alone, her hair loose down her back, and a priest in red kneels to receive her. Below, most likely Joachim and Anne, an old man carries a small casket shaped like a house, and a woman in red lifts a hand toward the girl. The panel came from Seebenstein Castle, near Wiener Neustadt, and was given to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1922.