Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg, Germany 1471–1528 Nuremberg, Germany, Joachim and Saint Anne Meet at the Golden Gate plate 4 of 20 from series The Life of the Virgin, 1504 (printed after 1511), Woodcut

The only dated print from Dürer’s final series The Life of the Virgin, this print depicts Anne and Joachim, the parents of the Virgin Mary, embracing under the Golden Gate following Joachim’s sojourn into the mountains. Dürer imbues this biblical scene with emotional intimacy: when the couple did not first conceive, they took it as a sign of God’s displeasure, so Joachim went into the mountains to fast for five months. The couple is typically portrayed reuniting under the gate at their temple, called the Golden Gate, the architecture here reminiscent of Dürer’s native Nuremberg. The touching of their heads symbol- izes the conception of the Virgin. This work is significant for its use of single-point perspective, a technique that he had not used prior to this series. Dürer’s use of a vanishing point was likely learned from Bellini during his travels to Italy in the early sixteenth century. Following Dürer’s use of perspective in these prints, he began to write on the topic, leading to the common use of single-point perspective in prints in Northern Europe.

-Katherine Davies, Class of 2019

Gift of Mrs. Toivo Laminan (Margaret Chamberlin, Class of 1929), in honor of her mother, Anne Bixby Chamberlin (Class of 1898) 1968.34.2