ABSTRACT
Sculpture and paintings depicting the mother-daughter dyad of Saint Anne and the Virgin with a book were popular in Spain, and particularly in Seville, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Their genealogy can be traced to the medieval triad of grandmother, mother, and infant Christ, known as Anna Triplex or Selbdritt, which, like the Holy Kinship—the extended family of Christ, including Saint Anne’s three husbands and three daughters—was emphatically discouraged after the Council of Trent. The Education of the Virgin, however, was regarded with ambivalence by post-Tridentine Spanish iconographers. The figures themselves are highly unusual: a young girl, around seven years old, with all the seriousness and curiosity of the “age of reason,” stands at her mother’s knee in a recognizably domestic scene that differs in several ways from the earlier images. In the medieval arrangement of three generations, an oversized Saint Anne holds a much smaller daughter on her lap, with the infant Christ on his mother’s or grandmother’s lap. Although Mary is clearly equipped to nurse the infant Christ, Charlene Villaseñor Black explains that the hieratic scale glorified Anne as matriarch and served as “synecdoche […] for the extended clan of the Holy Kinship” (5).
