Originally the central part of a triptych, this large wooden panel (257 x 168 cm) was painted in 1342 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the altar of a side-chapel of Siena Cathedral, one of a set of altarpieces honouring the Virgin Mary, Siena’s protector.

The painting is striking not just for the richness of its gold decoration and precious pigments, including lapis lazuli, but also for the magnificently ornate architecture and daring perspective of the scene, created by receding paving slabs, columns, and arches, and by the progressive darkness engulfing the space beyond.

The modern-day title is Presentation at the Temple, but in fact the theme is a conflation of two distinct ceremonies: the Presentation of the Firstborn (thirty days after a male child’s birth: Numbers 3:45–51; 18:15–16) and the Purification of the Mother (forty days after the child’s birth: Leviticus 12).

Mary’s purification follows Old Testament precepts, but Jesus’s presentation is celebrated in the Gospel text (though the mouths of Simeon and Anna) as heralding a new era of redemption. This straddling of traditionsin which the links between former and latter covenants are made manifest, is made explicit by the presence in the composition of figures from the Hebrew Bible. In the spandrels at the top of the altarpiece the figures of Moses and Malachi hold scrolls with verses from Leviticus 12:8 and from Malachi’s messianic prophecy (Malachi 3:1) respectively. Below them, on the capitals of two pillars, the artist has depicted statues of Moses holding the tablets of the Law, and of Joshua his successor, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land.

Whilst the High Priest sacrifices Mary’s modest offering of two birds (Leviticus 12:8), the protagonists, clothed in sumptuous exotic silks, stand in two groups in the foreground. At left, we see Joseph, with Mary and two women wearing earrings in the manner of female Jews from the artist’s own time (Hughes 1986); at right, the baby Jesus (kicking and sucking his finger) is cradled by the aged Simeon, now ready to be ‘dismissed in peace’ (Luke 22:29). Meanwhile Anna, standing tall and dignified, holds a scroll inscribed with her own prophecy recorded in Luke 2:38, and points to Jesus the Redeemer.

The painting is not just a visual delight, but a learned exercise in exegesis, articulating a Christian understanding of the bridge between the Old and the New Testaments.

References

Hughes, Diane Owen. 1986. ‘Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City’, Past & Present 112: 3–59