The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

The iconological type to which this group belongs, combining the Virgin and Child with her mother, Saint Anne, generally goes by its German name, Annaselbdritt (literally, "Anne triplicated"). It developed in proportion to the growing devotion to Saint Anne amid theological concerns to establish the Virgin Mary's exemption from original sin, which eventually became dogma. Compositions that bind the three together in closely knit familial groupings became one of the classic and most deeply meditated pursuits of Florentine High Renaissance masters, challenging all their harmonious instincts. Leonardo da Vinci treated the subject.in the Royal Academy cartoon of about 1499 and in another of 1501, since lost, as well as in the Louvre painting begun about I507. The marble group by Andrea Sansovino in Sant' Agostino, Rome, dates from 1512, and that by Francesco da Sangallo in Or San Michele, Florence, from 1526. Rather than with the public monuments, our terracotta shows most in common with Michelangelo's drawings of about 1501 and about 1505 in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and in the Louvre. In the Louvre design Saint Anne's right hand is also firmly planted on the support and the Virgin's neck bends back in response to her mother, her right arm hooked, the fingers cupping her breast (Charles de Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo, Novara, 1975, vol. I, no. 26r). The modeler
seems thus to have been privy to the great master's private musings, and it is marvelous to behold a member of the modest class of terracotta statuettes serving as a filter for the loftiest High Renaissance lessons in equipoise. The group has been confidently, briskly built up on a half base, open in the back, its front bearing masks and dolphins that were cast and applied. The identities of artists in this field are yet to be discovered. Ours shows much in common with a "Master of the Unruly Children," so named for groups in Berlin and London, the nimble Christ Child resembling them particularly.