Birth of the Virgin

Like numerous other episodes from the childhood of the Virgin Mary, her birth is not mentioned in the Bible. Apocryphal texts therefore served as the source for the depiction of this event, even if they report on it only summarily, without further motivic embellishment.

In keeping with the pictorial tradition for this theme, the event takes place in an interior. A red curtain has been gathered up to reveal a maternity room with middle-class furnishings. Propped up against her pillows and nestled under a green velvet cover, St Anne sits in a baldachin bed placed parallel to the picture plane and spreading across its entire breadth. With outstretched arms she receives her swaddled child from the midwife. The latter's rolled-up sleeves as well as the wooden bathtub and the covered jug - likewise made of wood - in the foreground indicate that she has just prepared the new-born child her first bath. A group of four women visitors - wearing white head coverings like that of St Anne - crowd together on the far side of the bed and solemnly watch the proceedings.

[Elsbeth Wiemann, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, revised 2015]