In this article from 2015 Dr Catherine Lawless looks at the cult of St Anne (mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Christ), her role in the establishment of the Immaculate Conception as dogma, and the iconography and visual language used in representations of St Anne in her patronal roles.
Catherine Lawless is Director of the Centre for Gender and Womens Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on the role of gender and identity in Italian Medieval and Renaissance art and in particular, on the representation of the female religious body. She is also interested in Catholic art of the religious revival of the nineteenth-century in Ireland and the role of women as patrons.
Catherine Lawless, ‘The Holy Grandmother St Anne and ‘the Fleshly Trinity’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 104, No. 416 (Winter 2015/2016), 433 – 436, x-xi, 437 – 443. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24640793
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On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, a German Benedictine monk, Trithemius of Spandheim, listed the reasons why St Anne, mother of the Virgin and thus grandmother of Christ, was venerated. Hers was a lengthy remit: she cured melancholia, protected those fallen among enemies or thieves, freed prisoners, saved those in peril at sea, protected against plague and pestilence, helped women in labour, and guarded against sudden death and dying. One of those patronal roles, protection against storms, could be said to have precipitated the Reformation, in that the young Martin Luther (son of a miner) caught in thunder and lightning, cried out to St Anne that, in return for her protection, he would become a monk, and, in order to fulfil his vow, entered the Augustinian friars.
St Anne’s popularity continued throughout the seventeenth century in Catholic Europe, but the cult was not without its problems for those concerned with Catholic reform. As beautifully put by the sociologist of saints’ cults, Pierre Delooz, St Anne is a constructed saint: ‘The real saint is Jesus’ anonymous maternal grandmother. Everything else has been constructed, but what a gigantic construction!’. There is little enough to be found about the Virgin Mary in canonical scripture, but there is no reference at all to her parents, known in tradition as Joachim and Anne. The legend of this just and pious couple, who were wed for twenty years without conceiving a child and were then rewarded for their goodness with the birth of the Virgin Mary, was spread through apocryphal gospels and firmly embedded within the Christian imagination by the time of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, written around 1260 and designed to explain the various feasts of the Church to its congregations. By this time, a complicated genealogy had been elaborated, which explained Anne’s kinship to Elizabeth, mother of St John the Baptist, and further, explained the references to the brothers of Christ in the Bible by providing Anne, after the death of Joachim, with another two husbands, Cleophas and Salome, fathers of another two daughters, Mary Cleophas and Mary Salome, mothers of the ‘brothers’ of Christ, which should, according to St Jerome, be understood rather as the ‘cousins’ of Christ.
Linked to the cult of St Anne was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This doctrine was controversial, and was only made dogma in 1854 by the bull Ineffabilis Deus. The unique position of the Virgin Mary among human beings had been confirmed by the Council of Ephesus in 431, where she was pronounced Theotokos, or ‘Mother of God’. The purity of such a person was implicitly acknowledged by this confirmation but the doctrine of Immaculacy had yet to be developed. The writings of Justin the Martyr and Irenaeus drew a parallel between Eve and Mary, and between Adam and Christ. The link was thus made between Eve as the cause of original sin and Mary as the mother of the Redeemer of humankind from the consequences of that sin. The problem was the inability to reconcile the freedom from original sin of the Virgin with the need for Redemption. If the Virgin was conceived free from sin, how could she need redemption by her son? If God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ was the only one capable of being conceived without sin, how could the Mother of God, the one from whom He took flesh, be sinful? If the Virgin was conceived without sin, then how did this conception take place? If the Virgin was free from sin at her conception, then how could her mother have been conceived in sin? The legends of the Birth of the Virgin all agree on one point: the miraculous, if not immaculate, conception of the Virgin Mary by an elderly sterile couple.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, however, became the subject of learned debate in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and the seeds for the future controversy between the Franciscans and the Dominicans were sown. The freedom of Mary from sin was not in doubt; the doubts arose over the moment of her freedom, with many holding to the view that she was purified after conception, in her mother’s womb. Controversy continued throughout the fifteenth century. The Council of Basel proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to be of ‘pious opinion’ in 1439…In the early years of the sixteenth century Vincenzo Bandello, General of the Dominicans, composed his own office for the feast of the Conception, wherein he substituted the word sanctification for conception.
Thus, by the time of the Council of Trent, the cult of St Anne was popular, but contained difficulties. The saint was not found in holy scripture, her cult was linked to what was deemed by many as the unedifying spectacle of an elderly widow marrying three times, and the nature of the conception of her daughter was disputed. The problem of the three marriages was soon resolved with refutations of the so-called trinubium Annae, leaning on learned authorities such as Lefevre d’Etaples. Controversy concerning the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, not yet promulgated, continued throughout the seventeenth century…More problematic, however, was the lack of scriptural evidence for the parents of the Virgin, and the vast weight of imagery, written, oral, painted, sculpted and sung, of the early life of the Virgin, a life that depended on the apocryphal gospels. In De Festis, Benedict XIV addressed some of these concerns in somewhat circular argument, pointing out that, as the holiness of Mary is indisputable, that of her parents must also have been. The names tradition gave to the parents, Anne, meaning Grace, and Joachim, meaning Preparation of the Lord, describe their virtues, and did not have to be understood as their given names.
The popularity of St Anne was such that her cult had to be defended. Pope Gregory XIII retained the feast in the Roman Missal in 1584.17 Mary had to have been born of a mother, and, as Mary was holy, so too must have been her mother, the woman who was, after all, to become the grandmother of Christ. I believe that the key reason to preserve and promote the cult of St Anne was connected with the importance of the Eucharist, and in particular, the defence of Transubstantiation. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a type known as Anna Selbdritt, or Sainte Anne Trinitaire, was popular in painting. This was a depiction of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child, depicted in various combinations. Sometimes, as in the famous depiction of Masaccio and Masolino, a hieratic combination of the older woman enfolding the younger one [fig.6:1], who in turn holds the Child on her knee, was used. This type usually encapsulates two adult women of roughly similar size. Other types depicted St Anne holding a tiny Virgin on one hand, a tiny Child on the other, or standing holding the Child with a smaller Virgin standing beside her. The devotion could thus be channeled from St Anne as grandmother to St Anne as mother.
Leonardo da Vinci’s and Michelangelo’s dynamic renderings of the Anna Selbdritt group proved influential in later sixteenth and early seventeenth-century depictions of the saint, in which the old static compositions of the tripartite group are transformed by movement. In all types, however, the emphasis is tri-form and emphasises the maternal lineage of the Child. Thus the fleshly inheritance is shown in an earthly and bodily ‘trinity’ of St Anne, Virgin and Child. Christ’s flesh, inherited from his maternal line, is of the utmost significance. It is, after all, this flesh, taken on from the Virgin Mary, ‘clothed in her flesh’, which will be tortured, sacrificed on the cross, and consumed in the Eucharist.
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The ‘trinity’ relationship between the grandmother, mother and child, is particularly visible in one of the most famous depictions of St Anne, and is thus worth dwelling on, despite its early date. In the image of Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child by Masaccio and Masolino, the cycle of redemption is linked to the composition of the Masaccio/Masolino Anna Selbdritt. Saint Anne is at the top of the pyramid formed by the three figures, and the inscription on her halo has additional significance if read in architectural terms as the apex. She is the forerunner of the other two, yet all three have their origin in God. Similarly, the only figure looking directly at the spectator is the Child; while Mary looks to her left, Anne looks downwards. The eyes of the Child and his raised hand are what lead into the painting, while the eyes of the two women deny access.
The suggestion by Verdon that this painting could have formed the centrepiece of the Eucharistic tabernacle on the high altar itself is particularly attractive in the light of its Eucharistic imagery. Vasari tells us that he saw the image in the Church of Sant’ Ambrogio. Sant’ Ambrogio was the focus of the cult, due to a miracle that took place in the church in 1230 when a priest named Uguccione saw the Host bleeding. However, the cult of the Eucharist shifted to Santa Maria Novella in the early fifteenth century, while that of the Immaculate Conception grew in Sant’ Ambrogio, perhaps as a conscious replacement. The iconography of the Masaccio Anna Sebdritt can be linked with both of these cults. The halo of Saint Anne is inscribed S[anta] Anna è di Nostra Donnafast[igio] (Saint
Anne is the Pinnacle of the Virgin) in Gothic script, and the halo of the Virgin is inscribed, also in Gothic script, Ave Maria Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum Benedicta Tu, and this is repeated in Roman capitals on the base of the throne, foreshortened where the base curves.
The lettering and the language of the inscriptions may represent the old and new orders: Saint Anne with her Gothic and vernacular inscription could be seen to represent the old order, and the Virgin with her Gothic inscription in Latin could be seen as the mediating point between old and new. There is thus a juxtaposition between old and new, perhaps representing the old and new orders symbolised in the group: Saint Anne is the representative of the Old Law, while the Virgin is the mediating point between old and new: in her womb the Redeemer of the world is conceived through the Holy Spirit. The repetition of the angelic salutation at the Annunciation of the conception of Christ emphasises the Incarnation and the Eucharist.
The nudity of the child and the actions of the two angels kneeling beside the throne can be explained by reference to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the body of Christ, the fleshly, human body that was sacrificed to atone for the sins of mankind. The Eucharist is thus directly relevant to the Incarnation itself, which, in turn leads back to the necessity of the conception of the Virgin Mary. By showing the Child naked, the artist reveals the vulnerability of the flesh that is to be sacrificed and then consumed in the form of the Eucharist. The deliberate exposure of the Child’s genitalia by the Virgin becomes clear if the theories of Steinberg, Bynum Walker and Trexler are taken into account. According to these writers, the humanity of Christ was most evident in his circumcision, in which the wounds inflicted upon him were typological of those to come in the Crucifixion. Similarly, the blood which ran from the wound of the circumcision showed that he was human and could suffer pain, and was the first proof of the Incarnation of God as man. Saint Anne becomes important here as she is the carnal grandmother of Christ, representing the fleshly lineage and not the spiritual. The angels with thuribles on each side of the throne clearly refer to a liturgical ceremony, and most probably to the moment in the Mass when the priest consecrates the bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ.
In an article published in 1978, Wirth drew attention to the gestures made by Saint Anne in various northern paintings and prints. He pointed out, that in engravings such as Hans Baldung Grien’s Anna Selbdritt with Saint Joseph of 1511 and Anna Selbdritt with Saints Joachim and Joseph of around the same date, Saint Anne is clearly gesturing towards the genitals of the Christ Child, and in the former print actually touches them. Wirth argues that this gesture is in fact a charm or spell placed on the child by Saint Anne in order to withstand his mother’s desire to save him from his ultimate fate.
Wirth uses the famous description of Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon of Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, in a letter dated 3 April 1501 from the Carmelite friar, Pietro Novalara to Isabella d’Este: ‘Since he has been in Florence, he has worked on just one cartoon, which represents a Christ Child of about one year, who, freeing himself from his mother’s arms, seizes a lamb and seems to embrace it. The mother almost rising from the lap of Saint Anne catches the Child to draw it away from the lamb, that sacrificial animal which signifies the Passion. Saint Anne, barely rising from her seat, seems to wish to restrain her daughter from parting the Child from the lamb, which perhaps signifies the Church that would not wish that the Passion of Christ be prevented. The figures are all life size, but they are in a small cartoon, because all are either seated or bent forward, and each one is placed before the other towards the left; and this sketch is not yet finished’.
…Fra Pietro Novalara’s explanation of the work that he had seen by Leonardo can be useful in looking at other works of St Anne, the Virgin and Child. He links Saint Anne with the sacrifice of Christ and with the sacrificial animal of the lamb. This could give insight into images such as that by Carlo Saraceni, now in the Palazzo Barberini (1610-20), where St Anne holds the hand of the child in one hand, and the wing of a dove in the other. The ugliness of the gesture, with the animation of the dove trapped, is a fitting sign of the brutality of the sacrifice demanded of the young child…Eucharistic and Immaculatist imagery combine in Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with St Anne commissioned by the Palafrenieri guild of S Anna for their altar in St Peter’s. The child steps on the head of the serpent, the symbol of original sin and usually, in Immaculatist imagery, trampled by the Virgin herself.
The nudity of the child, and the prominence of his genitals, give weight to the importance of the fully incarnate child, proof of which is found in his phallus. The breasts of the Virgin, clearly apparent in a tight fitting bodice, also fit into older and more traditional iconographies, semiotically linking us to the medieval Madonna of Mercy, whose milk, which nourished Christ, is seen as a symbol of her role as co-redemptrix and who, in medieval painting, indicates her breast as Christ indicates his wounds. The flesh of Christ, taken from his maternal descent and nourished with her milk, is then sacrificed and consumed in the Eucharist, and redeems mankind from the consequences of sin.
Although the group of St Anne teaching a young virgin to read was popular, it has been used by historians to investigate whether such an image had important implications of either encouraging or reflecting, or both, female literacy; it can also share in Eucharistic significance. As indicated above with Murillo, the book was symbol of the Logos, the word made flesh, a flesh which was consumed in the Eucharist. The representation of Mary alone with a book becomes more powerful when that book is shared by her mother, she who gave flesh to Mary who in turn clothed Christ with her flesh. However, the range of patronal functions attributed to St Anne by Trithemius warns us against a unilateral reading of images, which are as polyvalent as the saint herself.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
– Cover Image
– Madonna and Child with St Anne, Caravaggio
– St Anne with the Virgin and Child, Masaccio and Masolino