Het sterfbed van de H. Anna

The deathbed of Saint Anne is the concluding panel of Metsys’s St. Anne Altarpiece of 1509, completing the narrative cycle that began with Joachim’s rejection at the Temple. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium holds this scene showing Anne’s peaceful death surrounded by her family—a subject designed to offer comfort and a model of the “good death” to the Brotherhood of St. Anne who commissioned the altarpiece. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The deathbed scene is arranged with ceremonial gravity, the dying saint centered among attendant figures. Metsys contrasts the stillness of death with the grief of the living through differentiated expressions and gestures.