In a marginal note at Luke 8:21, the Rheims Bible of 1582 states that ‘our spiritual kindred is to be preferred before carnal cognation’. In a Catholic translation of the Bible, made in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, this was a polemical point aimed at the Protestant Reformers, who had rejected canon law’s formalisation of ‘spiritual kinship’ as creating numerous (and unpopular) impediments to marriage amongst spiritual kin. But it also seems to anticipate a tension between worldly and spiritual kinship, with the latter properly claiming first place.

The Markan version of the story of Jesus’s mother and brothers coming in search of him is coloured by an earlier verse which explains their purpose: hearing about the beginning of his teaching and healing ministry, and his calling of the disciples, ‘they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself”’ (3:21). This detail is absent in Luke and Matthew, but in Mark’s story sharpens Jesus’s question ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’, making it seem like a repudiation of them. And indeed, they play no part in Mark’s Gospel.

The so-called Holy Kinship associated with the intensely popular cult of St Anne (a set of beliefs about Mary’s family ties and a related iconographic motif, which we see represented here in the fifteenth-century carved altarpiece from Germany) pictures a quite different relationship between Christ and his earthly family. Here he is firmly embedded in a network of kinsfolk, reaching backwards to his grandmother, grandfather, and two step-grandfathers (as we might put it), and forwards to his cousins who, even as babes-almost-in-arms, have been recruited to the support of this dynasty’s star. This rich imagining, is, of course, impelled by reverence for Jesus’s mother, Mary, who is all but absent from Mark’s Gospel, and central only to the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. Here, however, with her mother Anne, she assumes a prominent place in a tightly and harmoniously fashioned group-portrait of a matriarchal clan.

It is ironic, that the sweeping away by the Reformers of the cult of the Holy Kinship as biblically unwarranted occurred at the same time as the notion of spiritual kinship was likewise rejected as biblically unsound. This meant, however, that although baptism, of course, persisted, it became increasingly ‘familiarized’—that is to say, that the parents steadily took a more prominent role, and godparents were more and more likely to be chosen from amongst the child’s relatives. The stark reality depicted in the illuminated initial of an initiation rite from which parents and other relatives were banned—and the naked child is handed over to strangers who will become kin—lost some of its starkness in virtue of this ‘familiarization’. With it, something was also lost of the challenge which the rite posed to exclusive claims for carnal kinship.

Christianity, however, did not typically set the two kinships against one another. The commentary from the Rheims Bible’s margin may warn us against falling in too readily with the demands of ‘natural’ kinship. But the artist who sculpted the ‘Holy Kinship’ altarpiece accomplished something of a wonder in showing what the ‘natural’ might spiritually achieve. It unifies this potentially disparate group, with all its centrifugal forces, in a diverse yet harmonious company. And the genius of the legend is surely the same as the genius of the sculpture: to represent the living and the dead, different generations, males and females, and all those siblings and cousins, not as discordant rivals (as they might be), but as collaborators in an extraordinary joint and spiritual enterprise.

Such collaboration amongst carnal kin is not to be taken for granted. As Augustine liked to say, the first founder of the earthly city (Cain) was a fratricide, as was the founder of the capital of the earthly city (Romulus) (Augustine City of God, 15.5). The Holy Kinship should not be read, then, as a mere assertion of the merits or claims of carnal kinship, but as an exercise in imagining the redemption of those ties, and their reconciliation with the claims of spiritual kinship (perhaps especially by means of the Word of God present on the knee of his mother, to whom the Scriptures, on the knees of her sisters, bear witness).

The profound harmony of this image with its affectionate and tightly knit group, contrasts sharply with the quite different harmony of Singer Sargent’s brooding portrait of the four daughters. For all that it is deeply satisfying as a picture, the harmony of its elements is not a harmony between the girls, who seem to exist in isolation one from another. For all that carnal kinship is often termed ‘natural’, the naturalness of such kinship can sometimes seem anything but inevitable.