Anna en Joachim schenken hun bezittingen aan de tempel

Anna and Joachim donating their possessions to the Temple is another panel from Metsys’s St. Anne Altarpiece of 1509, commissioned by the Brotherhood of St. Anne in Leuven. The scene follows the apocryphal narrative that the childless couple gave away their wealth before the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary. Now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the panel shows Metsys managing architectural perspective and multiple narrative figures within a complex temple interior.

The temple architecture provides a convincing spatial setting, with figures arranged to guide the narrative reading from left to right. The rendering of liturgical objects and architecture demonstrates Metsys’s descriptive precision.