Artwork · 16th century · Albrecht Dürer

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Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

Albrecht Dürerprobably 1519Oil on linden60 × 49.8 cm

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At a glance

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Saint Anne, in a white headcloth, rests her hand on the shoulder of her daughter Mary, who joins her hands in prayer over the sleeping Christ Child.
Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted it in oil on a linden panel, probably in 1519.
Three faces and several hands are packed close together, and only the grandmother looks straight out at us.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on the grandmother's face at the top. Her white headcloth wraps her forehead and chin, so her face shows only through a round opening. Each big brown eye has a tiny dot of white light in it. Unlike the other two, Anne meets our gaze.
Look at Mary's shoulder. Anne's fingers rest lightly on the pink dress. Dürer paints the shape of every fingernail and the creases at each knuckle. It is the hand of a mother steadying her grown daughter.
Zoom in on the baby at the lower left. The Christ Child sleeps with his eyes shut and his lips slightly parted. His round cheeks, curly hair, and small ear look like a real baby's. A sleeping Christ Child is often read as a hint of the death that lies ahead of him.
Look at Mary's hands at the bottom center. Her fingertips touch as if in prayer. Up close, a fine web of cracks runs across the paint. These cracks formed over five hundred years as the wooden panel and the paint dried and shifted.
On the green background beside Mary's head, find the date 1519 and a large A with a small D tucked inside. This is the monogram Dürer put on his prints and paintings.

When it was painted

In January 1519, bad news reached Nuremberg. Emperor Maximilian I, one of Dürer's most important patrons, had died. Dürer was forty-seven that winter, and his prints had already made his name known across Europe.

A few years earlier, the emperor had granted him a yearly pension. The city of Nuremberg paid it on the emperor's behalf. When Maximilian died, the city council stopped paying. Getting the new emperor, Charles V, to confirm the pension became a real worry for the artist.

Saint Anne, the grandmother in this picture, is Mary's mother. She does not appear in the Bible but comes from old church tradition, and in Dürer's day she had a large following in the German lands. The Albertina museum in Vienna owns a brush drawing Dürer made in that same year, 1519. It shows his wife, Agnes, as Saint Anne, and it is known as the study for Anne's face here.

Albrecht and Agnes had married in 1494, and they had no children. In the summer of 1520 the couple set off together on a long journey to the Netherlands. That autumn, in Cologne, Dürer finally got Charles V to confirm his pension. All through the trip he kept a diary, down to the money he spent and earned.

Centuries later the panel crossed the ocean to New York, into the collection of the department store owner Benjamin Altman. When Altman died in 1913, he left it to the Metropolitan Museum with the rest of his collection. Look once more at Anne's face inside the white headcloth. Those steady eyes and round cheeks began with Dürer's brush drawing of his wife.

The painter

Albrecht Dürer

1471–1528

All paintings by Albrecht Dürer →

More by the same painter

Music-Making Angels1521

Head of a Young Woman1522

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you spot the fine cracks running across Mary's fingers?
Why?Why do you think Dürer let only Anne, out of all three, look at us?
What about you?Grandmother, mother, and baby share one small space here. When grandparents help raise children today, what does that give a family, and what might it cost the grandparents?

Same period