The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

The Virgin Mary offers her breast to the infant Jesus as her mother, Saint Anne, reaches toward the child. Episodes from the story of the conception of the Virgin appear in the background. In the distance, the Virgin's father Joachim tends his sheep in the countryside. An angel, rendered by just a few strokes of red paint, appears to him and tells him that his elderly wife will conceive a child. Upon hearing the news, he returns to Jerusalem. Joachim and Anne embrace before the gate to the city in the middle ground at right. The artist, Lieven van Lathem, tied the elements of the narrative together by showing the figures in the same clothes at each appearance and by carefully modulating the recession of the landscape into the distance.