Anna Selbdritt

Jörg Stocker's Anna Selbdritt, painted around 1490 and now in the Sammlung Dursch, depicts the devotional grouping of Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Christ — a subject known in German as the Anna Selbdritt and in Latin as the trinubium — which experienced an extraordinary surge of popularity across northern Europe in the late fifteenth century. The cult of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin, was intensively promoted by Franciscan theologians in connection with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and the Anna Selbdritt image concentrated three generations of sacred lineage in a single devotional composition that carried enormous theological weight. Stocker was a Swabian painter active in Augsburg who participated in the great wave of Anna Selbdritt production that swept southern German painting in the decades around 1490. The Sammlung Dursch panel is one of several Stocker works in this collection that document the Swabian devotional tradition of this period.

Stocker arranges the three-generation grouping with the monumental Saint Anne as the largest figure, the Virgin a somewhat smaller presence, and the Christ child at the devotional center of the composition. The Swabian workshop style renders the figures with the warm, accessible clarity suited to devotional panel painting, the close grouping conveying the familial tenderness central to the image's appeal.