Giotto and the Meeting at the Golden Gate
Joachim, Anne and an almost startlingly intimate reunion.
Given that devotional inspiration was a major goal of medieval religious art, I reckon Giotto di Bondone would’ve been chuffed that I, a good Catholic boy, had never heard of Joachim and Anne until I encountered his fresco The Meeting at the Golden Gate (c. 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy).
In my defence, the couple never made the final cut of the Bible. Their story comes from the Protoevangelium of James, written in the second century, and later retellings. The wealthy older couple who suffered years of painful childlessness aren’t, I suspect, known to many people. In the story, their childlessness is treated as a sign of divine reproach. Shunned and in grief, Joachim and Anne both prayed intently for a child, and ultimately an angel appeared to announce that Anne would conceive a child destined to be known worldwide.
If the set-up seems familiar, there’s a reason for that: it echoes biblical stories such as Abraham and Sarah’s. The child Joachim and Anne had was, of course, the Virgin Mary. Beliefs about her total sinlessness and perpetual virginity developed over many centuries, amid theological debate. With every respect to religious readers, some of that development reads to me like convenient retrospective narrative adjustment in response to theological challenges.
The fresco itself is beautiful: Joachim arriving back from pasture at the Golden Gate, a solid masonry gateway set against that familiar medieval deep blue sky; Anne receiving him with a group of women just behind her, framed in the gateway. But the most remarkable aspect is how Giotto depicts their embrace. Their faces are pressed closely together, their bodies effectively merged so that the mantles seem to enclose them as one mass. It reads as a real reunion between two people rather than a ceremonial depiction. In the context of this period of art, it strikes this viewer as an almost startlingly intimate image, not in its content but in the artist’s willingness to depict it. I can see why it’s sometimes called the ‘first kiss’ in art history, even if that doesn’t stand up literally.