Madonna and Child with Saint Anne and the patron saints of Florence

Saints identified by a city

Most attributes point at a person's death or trade. This title uses a different key altogether: it names a group not by who they are but by which town claims them. Civic patronage is a real category in the iconographic system, and it produces its own conventions — the saint holding a model of the walls he protects, the saint whose feast the city keeps, the saint whose relics the city owns. Anne, named separately here, belongs to the ordinary system instead: she is the mother of the Virgin, and painting identifies her by that relation, usually with a book and with the young Virgin beside her. In this collection 8 titles name Anne.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1510 and gives the National Museum in Warsaw as its location. The dimensions are 218 x 149 cm, a large upright. It is filed under group portraiture, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

What the title leaves for the picture

Which patrons of Florence appear, and in what order, is not recorded. A viewer standing in front of the panel would read the attributes and know; the catalogue field has compressed that reading into a phrase. This page is limited to the field, and the identification of individual figures is left where the record leaves it — open.