The Virgin Holidays. Introduction of the Virgin in Temple. Saint Anne and young Virgin Mary.

Anne, and the attribute that is a lesson

Anne is identified by her daughter. The convention gives her the young Virgin at her side, usually with a book, and the pairing is what names her — an attribute that is another person, and a relationship rather than an object. The title here adds the episode: the presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, which belongs to the same body of tradition and supplies the setting. 8 titles in this collection name Anne, and this one names her alongside the child who identifies her.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1907 and gives the Perm State Art Gallery in Perm, Russia, as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Byzantine as the style and Russian as the nationality; the measured colour families are ochre and yellow.

The rarest style label in the collection

Byzantine appears on exactly 1 entry here — this one. The term names a tradition of religious image-making with its own rules of proportion, gesture and gold, formed in the eastern Mediterranean and continued for centuries in Russia. A work dated 1907 carrying that label is describing a deliberate return rather than a survival: an artist of the twentieth century adopting the conventions of a much older visual system. The record states the label and the year, and it does not explain the choice; neither does this page.