The Holy Kinship

c. 1514

Pen and brown ink

269 × 428 mm

Praun-, Esterházy collection

Suggested by the frieze-like arrangement of the figures and by the pointed arch motif on the right, signifying a door, the drawing was probably executed for a wall decoration. The depiction of the Holy Kinship with seventeen members is based on the apocryphal legend of the Trinubium (triple marriage) of Saint Anne, mentioned in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea. According to the legend, Joachim died soon after the birth of the Virgin Mary, and Anne married Cleophas, by whom she bore Mary Cleophas. After Cleophas’s death, Anne married Salome, who became the father of Mary Salome. Mary Cleophas married Alpheus, with whom she had four sons. Zebedee became Mary Salome’s husband and the father of her two sons. In the centre of Traut’s drawing there is the Virgin and Child with Anne; Anne’s three husbands are beside her on the left, in front of whom there is Mary Salome with her husband and children: James the Greater and John the Evangelist. The two bearded men on the right are Joseph, husband of Virgin Mary, and Alpheus. Alpheus’s wife, Mary Cleophas, is sitting on a pedestal holding Barnabas, behind her Jude Thaddeus, Simon and James the Lesser is seen.