圣母的诞生

Altdorfer sets the birth of the Virgin Mary not in a bedroom but inside a vast, half-built church. Down in one corner Saint Anne rests after the birth while midwives tend the baby and old Joachim comes home with provisions slung from his staff. The real spectacle is overhead, where a ring of angels sweeps around the columns, one of them swinging a smoking censer. The building itself mixes round Romanesque arches, pointed Gothic windows and newer Renaissance vaults all at once, so that Mary and the Church become one idea. Altdorfer, a leading painter of the Danube country around Regensburg, made this about 1520, just as Martin Luther's Reformation was beginning to turn many Germans against exactly this kind of glittering devotion to Mary.