Incontro di Gioacchino e Anna alla Porta Aurea di Gerusalemme

1497 was not a comfortable year to be a painter in Florence. The Medici had been driven out three years earlier, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was preaching the city into a republic of penitents, and that February his followers heaped mirrors, wigs, playing cards and pictures in the Piazza della Signoria and burned them. Filippino Lippi, the busiest painter in town, went on taking commissions straight through it.

The story on this panel is an old and quiet one. Joachim and Anne had grown old without a child. An angel came to each of them separately and sent them to the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, and their meeting there was read for centuries as the moment Mary was conceived. Filippino signed it on the stone sill of the gate itself, in gold letters, PHILIPPINUS DE FLORENTIA, with the year beside them.