The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint Joseph

Around 1600, when this was painted in Haarlem, its subject was already out of step with the city around it. Haarlem had turned Protestant a generation earlier, after the iconoclasm of 1566 stripped its churches of images, and a devotional picture like this had lost its public place. What it shows is an old Catholic grouping the Dutch called the Anna Selbdritt: Saint Anne, her daughter Mary, and the Christ child on Mary's lap, grandmother, mother, and grandson together. The point was to trace Christ's human family one step further back, to the woman who was his grandmother. Saint Anne's cult had run strongest in the Low Countries around 1500, roughly 100 years before this was made. The painter sets Saint Joseph at the side, gathering the whole household into one group. We can place the hand in Haarlem and near the year, but not name it; it has come down to us only as the Haarlem Master.