Anne’s story echoes biblical tales of barrenness reversed by God as a special sign of his favour to the parents and a singular benediction on their late, longed-for offspring: the birth of John the Baptist to the aged and childless Elisabeth and Zacharias in the Gospel of St Luke; an account that itself is foreshadowed by the miraculous birth of Isaac to Sarah in her late age and of Samuel to Hannah in the Old Testament. Indeed the very name of Mary’s mother was inspired – according to a train of association typical of the Apocrypha – by the character of Hannah, an exemplary mother, and of an exemplary child, a prophet who prefigures Jesus. Popular medieval handbooks like the Speculum humanae salvationis and the Biblia pauperum, which were illustrated to help the faithful to absorb the tenets and stories of their religion, organized the narrative of God’s redemption in a sequence of answering typologies from the Old and New Testaments; the compilers drew on collections of legendary and fanciful tales, and their taste definitely tended to the wondrous and the entertaining.6 They picked the most vivid episodes, about the ravens who feed the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs. 17: 1–6), and the never failing pot of meal and cruse of oil belonging to the widow of Zarephath (1 Kgs. 17: 12–16), about the fatal vow of Jephthah that he will sacrifice the first thing he sees, and it turns out to be his own daughter (Jg. 11, 12) – an ancient myth, a motif of fairy tale, as in the story of Beauty and the Beast. They liked to create rhymes across time, revealing the relationship between the past and the present. So, on the same page, Hannah offers Samuel, Anne presents Mary, and Mary and Joseph take the child Jesus to the Temple, in a symmetrical arrangement of rituals which affirms the similarities between the different mothers and their prodigious offspring.7
Saint Anne appears here in the character of a sibyl, indicating the heavenly origin and spiritual meaning of her daughter’s virgin motherhood, as Mary holds out her baby to bless his cousin. (Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist. Cartoon, c. 1507–8.)
As an old woman in the tradition of the grieving barren mothers of the Old and New Testaments, Saint Anne’s character also drew on another scriptural namesake, the aged seer Anna, who in the infancy Gospel of Luke prophesies at the presentation of Jesus in the Temple. ‘A prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; and she was a widow of about fourscore and four years …’, this Anna lived in the Temple, fasting and praying night and day. ‘And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem’ (Luke 2: 36–8).
In scenes of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (right), the old prophetess Anna appears like an aged Sibyl, indicating with her finger, either pointing to heaven, as for instance in Pietro Cavallini’s mosaic, made in the thirteenth century for S. Maria in Trastevere in Rome, or she holds a phylactery, quoting the words of the Gospel which identify her as a ‘profetissa’, in her left hand and indicates the future Saviour with her right, as in Giovanni di Paolo’s panel for an altarpiece, painted in Siena in 1450–55. Like the pagan visionaries, she too stands outside the faith, as the artists suggest by placing her on the periphery of the presentation scene; but she has been granted foreknowledge.
At the presentation of Jesus at the temple, Simeon holds the baby in his arms, and the seer Anna recognizes Jesus as the Saviour; together they foreshadow the role of Christian godparents. (Ambrogio L’orenzetti, The Presentation in the Temple, first half fourteenth century.)
The Jewish ritual observed by Jesus’ earthly parents at the Temple in Jerusalem was taken in patristic exegesis to prefigure the Christian baptism of infants, and the two Gospel witnesses at Christ’s presentation – Simeon on the one hand and Anna on the other – were allotted the role of precursors to Christian godparents. When Anna endorses Simeon’s vision, of the future glory and the pain of Jesus’ mission, she anticipates all those prophesying fairies of the tales who foresee the baby’s fate: like the several godmothers at the christening of Sleeping Beauty.
Seepage is a feature of medieval lore, visual and verbal, and Anna the prophetess’s role in Christ’s infancy seeps into his grandmother Anne’s; when she presents Mary as a child to the Temple, she too sees into her future. When the Christ child is born, she assists at the lying-in, though she is not represented as the glowing grandmother, but rather heavy-browed with grief at the torments she foresees. The Italian painters of the High Renaissance thus interpreted Anna formally as a Sibyl: Leonardo, in the famous cartoon in the National Gallery, shows Anne sitting at Mary’s shoulder, pointing straight up to Heaven with her left hand (here); Caravaggio developed the theme with vivid, even histrionic imagination when he painted Jesus, aged about six, helping Mary crush the head of a snake under her heel, while Saint Anne stands by, hands clasped together as if in prayer at this proleptic action.
The role of grandparents in the family was increasingly emphasized in the nineteenth century: here, one old nan, under a picture of Tom Thumb, cosily gathers up her brood to read them a story. (Gustave Doré, Frontispiece, Les Contes de Charles Perrault, Paris, 1862.)
Saint Anne becomes sibylline in her teaching capacity, too. Her English, French, German and Lowland devotees particularly emphasize this aspect of her character. In the early Renaissance outpourings of the imagined sayings and exempla of this exemplary mother, she is portrayed as a matriarchal source of wisdom, the founder of a mighty dynasty of saints and the repository of a kind of tribal Christian wisdom. In Germany, where the cult of the Holy Kinship, the extended family of Jesus, grew to intense popularity, the Hebrew name Anna became linked with the Old German Ana, grandmother, itself a feminine form of Ano, grandfather or ancestor (modern German Ahn); they are in turn related to Greek annis (maternal or paternal) grandmother, and Latin anüs, old woman, married or unmarried. The affectionate English word ‘Nan’ for Grandma, echoes this etymology, while the extension of the usage to ‘Nanny’, for nurse, reflects the role grandmothers like Saint Anne have traditionally played.
In medieval legend, Saint Anne was attributed three husbands and wondrous fecundity; she became the holy grandmother ABOVE of the Saviour’s brethren. (The Holy Kinship, Geertgen tot Sint-Jans.)
Her cult often placed her in recognizable, contemporary domestic settings as in this devotional print LEFT, in which she sits by the fire, while angels rock Mary’s cradle. (Jerome Wierix, The Life of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Antwerp, early seventeenth century.)
The legends surrounding her became ever more extravagant, provoking the fury – and the shame – of reformers like Luther. Her votaries allotted Anne no less than two previous husbands and several other children before her marriage to Joachim and the birth of the incomparable Mary.8 She became a dynastic ancestor, a tribal elder in the saga of the Holy Family, the bearer of John the Evangelist, James the Great and the Less, Thaddeus, Barnabas, and other saints. This constituted an ingenious but far-fetched attempt on the part of the Catholic faithful to provide a genealogy for those ‘brethren’ of Jesus so awkwardly referred to in the Gospels; by providing Jesus with all these close cousins, no damage was done to belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity (here).
Daughters and heirs to noble houses were possibly called after Anne rather than her daughter because they were hoped to be greatly fruitful, too, to found unshakeable, prolific dynasties: Anne’s liturgical titles included Stirps beata (Blessed Stock) and Radix sancta (Holy Root); her patronage implied fertility to a degree Mary’s single conception could not. French queens and princesses in particular were prominent promoters of Anne’s cult, after their parents had named them for the saint: as the founder of the Holy Family, she personified dynastic success, and as the tutor of the young Mary, she also represented female sagacity. The cultivated Anne de Bretagne, for example, daughter to the defeated Duke of Brittany, made three dynastic marriages, as if echoing her patron saint. First to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, then to Charles VI
II of France, and after his death in 1498, she remained queen when she married his successor Louis XII. Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, painted by Jean Bourdichon between 1500 and 1508, contains an intense portrait of her at prayer. An aged Saint Anne, heavily swathed in veils, eyes turned to heaven, indicates the queen with her right hand as her spiritual daughter (right).9
Meditations on Saint Anne’s life and virtues, however expansive in their fantasy, stress her crucial moral role in raising the future Saviour and his mother. Both are represented as her children in this strand of piety, sometimes both even sitting on her lap.10 In 1496, Jan van Denemarken gave a eulogistic account of Saint Anne’s teachings; it was published in the Netherlands and its frontispiece showed her holding a book on her lap, with her right hand raised in the gesture of exposition, while Mary and Jesus receive the benefits of her instruction.11 Johannes Trithenius, a writer in the circle of the Emperor Maximilian, composed his De laudibus sanctissimae matris Annae, as a commission for foreign merchants’ use, in 1524, the same year as her feast became a first-class festival of the Church; his influential book both constituted a response to existing devotion to Saint Anne in imperial and merchants’ circles, but also diffused the theme of her authority. She was popular far beyond the clerical circles of her propagandists: the fantastic apocryphal life invented for her guaranteed the worth of marriage and abundant offspring.
Anne’s fertile example fitted her for special efficacy in fulfilling dynastic hopes, and she became a favourite royal patron saint; she indicates here her spiritual daughter, Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. (Jean Bourdichon, Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, 1500–1508.)
Her cult also reached wide, urban diffusion among artisans and labourers, breaking through the Latin or scholarly boundaries of the liturgy and the cloister, partly because the propaganda in her praise either appeared in or was quickly rendered into the vernacular. The carpenters’ confraternity attached to the Carmelites in Paris placed itself under Saint Anne’s aegis, and called her the ‘Tabernacle of God’ – as if she were a kind of wooden ambry such as they might make themselves. In 1673, Louis XIV confirmed this confraternity’s statutes; other associations of workmen also adopted Anne as their patron saint and issued holy pictures in support.12 Throughout her cult, however, her value is guaranteed by her child: she is always lesser than Mary, and serves her so that she may fulfil her destiny. This character of servant sometimes inspires the artist to differentiate the two women’s clothing: Mary wears the finery of a nobleman’s child, and Anne the sober tunic of a housekeeper (here).
Usually, mother and daughter are reading from the Bible, which doubles as an oracle of Mary’s future and a primer for her lessons. By contrast, Mary often shows letters to Jesus in a book of hours; Anne’s recourse to the authority of scripture, like a Sibyl, provides assurance of her dependability as an instrument of God rather than an original narrator. In this respect, the literate Saint Anne acts as a counterweight to the illiterate storyteller – or at least proposes that a master narrative can be followed faithfully by an old woman: Anne acts as a wishful euphemism, countering prevailing prejudices.
Her role as a teacher in such images also offers iconic support for the idea of women’s learning among themselves. Les dévotes – as the religious women of France were known – fastened on to Anne’s part in raising Mary as a model young woman, in order to express their own desire for education.13 Paintings like Georges de la Tour’s grave and beautiful image of a lesson by candlelight, from the first half of the seventeenth century, possibly represent lessons in literacy between generations as they took place.14 In a sixteenth-century sculpture by an anonymous artist in Apt, Saint Anne, busy teaching from the Bible, raises the index finger of her right hand in the classic gesture of the prophet and storyteller. This raised right arm and telling finger, traditional in classical scenes of declamatio or adlocutio, recurs again and again, in the frontispieces to printed collections of stories.15 Women still predominate today, interestingly, as teachers at stages when most of the work is still being done aloud, as in kindergartens and primary schools.
The title page of John Bulwer’s Chirologia, a curious and fascinating volume on an aspect of rhetoric – hand gestures – which was published in 1644, compresses these circulating ideas about speaking in a manner which bears on the image of the woman narrator in the formative period of printed fairy tales (right). William Marshall, the artist, portrays two female figures standing opposite each other. On the left (and nothing is accidental), a plump Natura loquens (Eloquent Nature), with very long, unruly hair and many bare breasts in the pagan manner of Diana of the Ephesians, stands beneath an oak tree labelled ‘Dodona’ for Zeus’ sacred grove. She appears to be leaping on to a small wheel of fortune with one foot, while one hand pours water into a well with the inscription ‘Hinc latices’ (The waters flow from here). Her counterpart on the right, also pouring water into the well, is called Polyhymnia, muse of rhetoric, and she has both breasts covered and both feet firmly on the ground, and is declaring, ‘Digitisque loquor Gestumque decoro’ (I speak with my fingers and I ornament gesture). In the book which follows, Bulwer produces a remarkably vivacious catalogue of all types of wave and clench, sign and gesture, from street to school and back again, and his title-page artist is putting the author’s point that human communication is a poor, lame, incomplete thing without gesture. But the polarity expressed in the imagery is couched in a language lying at a deep, unconscious stratum of mid-seventeenth-century thinking: the Sibylline, however eloquent, is natural, wild, unkempt and highly risky; the social discipline of rhetoric, which includes all declamatory techniques like pose and gesture suitable for public performance, is necessary for human communication. Saint Anne, commonly found with her nose in a book, redeems the dubious status of natural female speech because she is represented as fully aware of the social proprieties of transmission, and understands how to relate with decorum. In short, here was a sage who was sage in the French sense of well-behaved; here was a Sibyl elder who knew how to behave.
While the imagery reinforcing Anne’s stature as tribal ancestor and mentor continues to flourish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, another existing aspect begins to develop even stronger popular devotion: ‘the caring housewife and gentle granny’.16 In woodcuts and engravings as well as on grand altarpieces and votive paintings, artists, often inspired by writers, interpret the story of Anne’s life with powerful emotional involvement. This often personal commitment can be felt in particular in pictures of Mary’s birth, which gave painters the pretext to portray the lying-in of their own contemporaries, of their own wives and perhaps even their own mothers (Pl. 2). Women friends – the godparents or gossips – are often shown arriving in the bedroom, while Saint Anne reaches out to hold her baby who has just been bathed by some helpers.17 In Francisco Zurbarán’s magnificent version of around 1627, one can see how an artist could interpret – indeed remember – such a scene very differently, for here Saint Anne sits propped up and worn out in bed while two young women bring her food and drink.18, 19 In the foreground, two midwives, both careful and loving portraits of old women, attend to the newborn. Contemporary costumes and medical practices are clearly depicted, including the use of stork-shaped instruments.20 The atmosphere of mutual help, practical and other, of a society’s internal bonds, of the best aspects of gossiping, speaks in such images of the births of children in the past.
Natural Eloquence, long hair loose, bare-footed and many breasted, stands beside the oracular oak tree of Dodona, opposite Polyhymnia, the disciplined muse of rhetoric: two aspects of speech, personified in classical female form, combine in the cistern of expressiveness. (William Marshall, frontispiece, Chirologia, London, 1644.)
The cult of the grandmother saint rose on a new wave of Christian piety which focussed with intense, sentimental fervour on the ordinariness, the humbleness, the domestic familiarity of the Holy Family. In the seventeenth century Anne was enjoying the heigh
t of enthusiasm: biographies, eulogies, meditations poured from the minds of her devotees – symptoms of a religious craze spreading through Europe to Poland in the east and Spain in the south. No fewer than seven books of Saint Anne’s praises were banned in the five years 1673–8, placed on the Index for excessive enthusiasm.21 At the same time as Anne the Regent of France identified herself with her patroness, her prodigious Dauphin, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, was identified with the Christ child, and a cult of the Child Jesus at court, rooted in Carmelite mysticism, instilled the virtues of a childlike spiritual demeanour, of spontaneous devotion, and simple affective language of prayer.
Anne of Austria’s passion for the Infant Christ was developed with renewed zest fifty years after her son’s birth, in the newly pious atmosphere of his court in the 1680s. Under the influence of the mystic Mme Guyon and the Abbé Fénelon, imitation of a child’s state again became the guiding principle of fervent devotions (right). The cult was termed repuerascentia, after a concept developed by Erasmus – ‘growing childlike again’; while the disciples became as little children, following Christ’s call, their spiritual advisors were cast in the role of nurses. The spiritual formation of the young person’s soul became the template of the relation with God, wisdom, all manner of higher things. Scenes from the New Testament which had hitherto seldom been selected by artists begin to recur in illustrated printed Bibles, or other educational and pious publications and pictures: the moment when Christ insists, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me … for of such is the kingdom of God’ (Mk 10: 14; Matt. 19: 13) inspires compositions which resemble the classic scene of nursery storytelling, with Christ cast as the fostering, loving teacher of the young, and his listeners as his adopted offspring (above).22 A confessor advised one of his spiritual charges:
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