3-072-073 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple-Altar Panel from Marienfeld, between 1456-1457. In the foreground the kneeling parents of Mary, Joachim and Anne, who brought her into the Jerusalem temple, which is represented here as a late Gothic edifice, contemporary to the artist, with golden roofs, sharp arches, stone traceries in windows and pinnacles crowning buttresses. We can also see double stone stairs leading to the temple erected on a mountain, which symbolises books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. The history said that the three-year-old Mary climbed these stairs on her own without any help. The slender figure of a small girl with hair let loose, in a blue dress decorated with ears and with rays near the neckline and sleeves, is visible on the stairs. The ears symbolise fertility and form an allusion to her future divine maternity, whereas the rays stand for physical and spiritual beauty. At the entrance to the temple, Mary awaits for the highest priest, Zechariah, presented in a 15th-century bishop's dress and with a crosier in his hand. Behind the windows, inside the temple, we can see the girls with whom Mary will weave the temple shroud that will tear at the moment of Christ's death on Golgotha.