The life of Mary: the presentation of Mary in the temple

The Presentation of Mary in the Temple belongs to the apocryphal Marian cycle from the Protevangelium of James, depicting the three-year-old Mary ascending the Temple stairs to be dedicated to God's service. The subject was particularly important in the devotional calendar introduced by the Council of Basel in 1441 and propagated by the religious reform movement that the Master of the Life of the Virgin served in Cologne. The child Mary ascending the steep Temple steps alone, watched by her anxious parents, was a compositionally distinctive image that the Cologne master rendered with characteristic emotional warmth.

The Temple staircase provides a dramatic diagonal that organises the composition around Mary's small ascending figure. The master's palette uses the deep azure and crimson standard in his cycle, with the architectural elements rendered in a warm buff stone colour that grounds the supernatural subject in material reality.