Workshop of Bernhard Strigel

Daan Cevat, London, probably in half-ownership with Galerie Fischer, Lucerne, 1956;

Lucerne, Galerie Fischer, 29 June 1957, lot 2243 (as School of Amiens, late 15th century), where unsold;

With Galerie Fischer, Lucerne;

From whom acquired by John and Johanna Bass, New York, November 1958 (as Swabian Master, circa 1470), for $6,000;

By whom donated to the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, in 1963 (inv. nos. 1963.021, 1963.022).

The John and Johanna Bass Collection at Miami Beach, Florida, Miami 1973, p. 12, cat. nos. 21 and 22 (as Circle of Hans Multscher);

M. Russell, in Paintings and Textiles of the Bass Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection, M. Russell (ed.), Miami 1990, pp. 86-87, reproduced (as Workshop or Circle of Bernhard Strigel).

Likely produced by an artist active in Southern Germany around the turn of the sixteenth century, these grand paintings originally formed part of a large altarpiece almost certainly depicting scenes from the life of Christ. The pair of panels illustrate the Holy Kinship, or Heilige Sippe, a familial subject derived from Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. The Memmingen-born painter Bernhard Strigel, with whom these paintings have often been associated, produced one of the most celebrated renditions of the subject, which, until 1919, formed the verso of a family portrait of Emperor Maximilian I and his first wife, Mary of Burgundy, with their son, Philip the Fair, and three grandsons.¹

In the foreground at left sits Saint Anne, behind whom stand her three husbands: Cleophas, Salome, and Joachim (with the white and red head covering). Beside Anne sits the Virgin Mary (born of Anne’s first marriage to Joachim) with the Christ Child. Saint Joseph is positioned just behind. Saint Anne’s daughters from her subsequent two marriages sit in the foreground at right. Mary Cleophas, holding an open book on her lap, is accompanied by her husband Alphaeus and their four sons: Saints James the Minor, Joseph the Just, Simon, and Jude. Beside her sits Mary Salome, whose spouse Zebedee places one hand on her shoulder and gestures to their two children, Saint John the Evangelist (in red, with an eagle and closed book) and James the Greater (with an apple and pilgrim’s staff).

¹ Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. nos. GG 832, 6411.