De weigering van het offer van Joachim

The rejection of Joachim’s offering at the Temple was one panel from Metsys’s ambitious St. Anne Altarpiece of 1509, painted for the Brotherhood of St. Anne in Leuven and now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. The narrative cycle follows the apocryphal story of the Virgin Mary’s parents, beginning with the elderly Joachim’s humiliation when his offering is refused because he has no children. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The temple interior provides an architectural setting that demonstrates Metsys’s understanding of perspective construction. Joachim’s dejected posture is rendered with empathetic naturalism against the priestly authority of the figures who reject him.