Birth of the Virgin

Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, sits in a large red bed. She seems to be handing her child to the midwife on the right. The two women at the front of the picture are preparing to bath and swaddle the baby. One pours water into a portable bath tub, the other has a basket of swaddling bands.Through the window on the left we can see Noah’s ark, the vessel built on God’s instruction to save Noah, his family and two of every animal from the great flood. Noah is in the stern, holding the white dove which he released three times to find out if any land had emerged from the flood waters (Genesis 8:8–12). Through the window on the right is an episode from the story of Balaam, an Old Testament seer consulted by Balak, King of Moab. The King was disturbed by the arrival of the Jewish tribes at the frontier of his kingdom and, rather than comfort the king, Balaam prophesied the birth of Christ: ‘A star shall rise out of Jacob and a sceptre shall spring up from Israel’ (Numbers 24: 17). In the Middle Ages, Balaam’s star was understood as the Virgin Mary. Both Balaam and Noah with the dove were illustrated in manuscript and block book editions of the early fourteenth-century Speculum Humanae Salvationis (‘Mirror of Human Salvation’).There are similarities between this picture and Birth of the Baptist (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA), which is twice monogrammed by Jan Rombouts. Rombouts' other paintings are more acccomplished than the Pittsburg panel, which may have been largely or wholly the work of assistants. Our painting could also be by an assistant, whose talents were limited and who had been trained by Rombouts early in his career, before the artist had been impressed by and learned from Jean Gossart and Bernaert van Orley.