Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child - Anna Selbdritt. Upper Rhine - late 13th century.

Important elm-wood sculpture carved in very high relief and hollowed at the back. Anne is seated in majesty, veil and wimple framing a composed face, holding at her left the blessing Child and at her right the crowned adolescent Virgin. This is an early iconography of the theme, with a hierarchy of scale typical of Upper Rhenish prototypes of the late 13th century. The use of elm accords with practices of workshops from the Upper Rhine / Lake Constance region. The drapery is treated in broken planes and shallow fluting, with V-shaped breaks over the knees. The line remains more graphic than naturalistic, a sign of the Romanesque–Gothic transition before the softening of the 14th century.

Ovoid heads, eyelids incised without pupils and short mouths reinforce the hieratic effect; the Virgin retains a youthful yet schematic grace, while the slender, elongated Child wears a garment with archaizing vertical folds. By its hierarchical proportions, frontality and the simplification of faces and folds, this sculpture belongs to the corpus of early Anna Selbdritt works that appeared in the Rhenish area at the end of the 13th century. A rare altar or niche piece from a century in which Gothic asserted itself without abandoning the Romanesque scheme. Losses to the Virgin's right hand and to Christ's hands; woodworm activity stabilized.
Works consulted:
· Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe, Virginia Nixon, 2004.
· Im Lichte Frankreichs. Deutsche Skulptur des 13. Jahrhunderts, Klaus Niehr.