The Birth of Mary

1303-1305
Fresco
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

The artist is comfortable with the medieval practice of merging successive moments into a single image. In this case the child is bathed and swaddled in the center foreground, then presented to her mother Anne directly above.

As usual, Anne lies in a bed in a comfortable private home with servants. In later centuries she is often relegated to the background and pictured as quite old, but here she appears to be in a vigorous middle age and her accepting the child is the central element in the composition.

In some images of this type servants bring food to the mother. Perhaps that is what the woman on the far right is handing to the person in the door.

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Read more about images of the birth of the Virgin.

Photographed at the chapel by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.