Joakim og Annas gensyn uden for Jerusalems Gyldne Port

Filippino Lippi was one of the most inventive painters of late fifteenth-century Florence — the son and pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi, trained in the circle of Botticelli — and his work carries that generation’s linear grace into a nervous, personal manner of his own. The subject is the meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, the embrace that announces the conception of the Virgin and closes the long sorrow of her childless parents; the episode belonged to the standard cycle of Marian narrative, painted alike for churches and for the private devotion of patrons who followed it as a story. The panel is dated 1497. It passed through the Dutch collections of Izaak Hoogenbergh and Willem Lormier before Gerhard Morell bought it in Amsterdam in 1763 for Frederik V, and so entered the Danish royal collection and, with it, the National Gallery of Denmark. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).