Madonna col Bambino e sant'Anna

For the older woman in this holy group, Dürer looked no further than his own household. The saint on the right is Anne, mother of the Virgin, and he modelled her on his wife Agnes, then in her mid-forties, working from a brush drawing that still survives in Vienna. Dürer painted the panel in 1519 in Nuremberg. Anne rests one hand on Mary’s shoulder and gazes off past the sleeping child, her expression less tender than braced, as if she already knows how the child’s story ends. Mary looks down at her son with her hands pressed together. Against the dark ground the three faces are lit like carved stone, and Dürer signed and dated the work along the right edge, in the small clear letters he used almost as a trademark.