Joachim Leaving the City

Andrea di Bartolo's Joachim Leaving the City depicts the moment from the Golden Legend when Joachim, shamed by the high priest's refusal of his Temple offering (because he was childless), withdraws to the wilderness with his flocks. The subject was part of the Marian narrative cycle — Joachim and Anna being the parents of the Virgin Mary — that was popular in late Trecento and early Quattrocento Sienese painting. Andrea di Bartolo worked in Siena in the generation after Bartolo di Fredi, his likely father, maintaining the conservative Sienese gold-ground tradition while incorporating some Trecento naturalism in his narrative compositions.

The narrative requires depicting Joachim in motion — a figure leaving a walled city, entering the landscape — which demands more compositional activity than static icon types. Andrea di Bartolo handles the city gate architecture in the stylized but spatially suggestive manner of late Trecento Sienese narrative painting, with the sheep rendered as a decorative procession.