The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate (1504): Art, History and Details

The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate (1504) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The first three woodcuts of Dürer’s narrative (1959.99.2-4) portray the events leading up to the Virgin’s birth. According to an apocryphal text, Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, had remained childless into old age. After Joachim’s offering at the temple was rejected for this reason, the angel Gabriel appeared to him in the wilderness to announce that his wife would soon bear a child. At this news, the two tenderly embraced at the city’s gate.

Object facts

• Title: The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate
• Date: 1504
• Creator attribution: Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
• Culture: Germany, early 16th Century
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1959.99.4

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Dürer, Albrecht. The Life of the Virgin. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1959.
• Matino, Gabriele, Patricia Fortini Brown, Sophia D'Addio, and Vittore Carpaccio. Carpaccio in Venice: A Guide. 2020.
• Peters, Emily J., Laura Ritter, William Griswold, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, and Koenraad Jonckheere. Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel. Cleveland, OH : Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.