Birth of the Virgin n.d.

This drawing of the birth of the Virgin Mary was made by an anonymous artist in ink and wash on paper. The setting is a domestic interior in which Saint Anne has just given birth to Mary, while attendants care for both mother and child. As an art historian, I’m especially interested in understanding how a drawing like this would have circulated in its own time. The cult of the Virgin Mary was very powerful in Europe from the medieval period onwards, and it’s interesting to think about how images like this one reinforced that cult. Was this drawing made as a design for a print, or perhaps as a study for a larger painting? Was it made for the artist’s own reference, or to be sold to a collector? These are the kinds of questions we can investigate by looking at the drawing’s style, its size, and its relationship to other images. These questions are answerable, but only with access to institutional resources like museum archives and period inventories. By this process we can understand the social role this image played.