The Seven Ages of Woman

Hans Baldung Grien painted this in 1544, the year before he died, in Strasbourg, a city that had by then gone over to the Reformation. Decades earlier he had trained as Dürer's most gifted assistant, and he kept returning all his life to one subject: the passage from youth to age and death. A small child stands at the front left, then a line of women from roughly ten to fifty, barely wrapped in looping cloth, and finally an old woman in profile at the back, pale and turned away. The figures are linked so that they read as one life moving through its stages rather than a group of strangers. Behind them a vine and a fig tree stand for renewal and return.