sant'anna metterza, greenville

The Sant'Anna Metterza in Greenville is a variant of the Anna Selbdritt type — Anna, Mary, and the Christ Child as a triple generational grouping — which was particularly popular in Florentine devotional painting from the late Trecento through the early Quattrocento. The type carried political as well as devotional significance in Florence, where a guild of Sant'Anna had political importance and the feast of Sant'Anna (July 26) commemorated the expulsion of the Duke of Athens in 1343. Bicci di Lorenzo's panel was likely commissioned for private devotion, the three-generation grouping emphasizing the continuity of sacred lineage and appealing to family-oriented piety.

The Anna Selbdritt composition places Anna as the largest, most hierarchically prominent figure, holding or framing the Virgin who in turn holds the Christ Child — a nested arrangement that the painter must render spatially convincing. Bicci di Lorenzo handles the overlapping figures with clarity, using scale differentiation and gold ground to establish the hierarchy.