The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple

In this panel the young Virgin, perhaps three or four years old, takes leave of her parents, Anna and Joachim, to enter the temple, where she would live until age 14. Anna and Joachim were elderly and had prayed to God that they might not remain childless. When Anna did conceive, she promised to raise her child in the temple, dedicated to God’s service. In the painting, Mary pauses on the steps and looks back at her parents, but when she approached the altar inside, according to one legend, “she danced with her feet, so that all the House of Israel rejoiced with her and loved her.”

This is one of three small paintings by Andrea di Bartolo at the National Gallery of Art that depict scenes from the life of the Virgin (see also Joachim and Anna Giving Food to the Poor and Offerings to the Temple and The Nativity of the Virgin). They were once part of an altarpiece that would have included many other scenes from the Virgin’s life (see The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple). The Bible does not tell us much about Jesus's mother Mary; Andrea’s pictures are based on an apocryphal account that was attributed to the evangelist Matthew. As devotion to the Virgin increased during the late Middle Ages, so did the legends surrounding her life. An entire cycle of stories evolved that loosely paralleled events of Christ's own birth and childhood (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, etc.). These helped humanize holy figures for devotion that was increasingly centered on an emotional connection and for religious images that traded the abstraction of Byzantine models for a depiction that more closely resembled the everyday physical world.