Holy Kinship
Holy Kinship was a popular theme in religious art throughout Germany and the Low Countries, especially during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Holy Kin were the extended family of Jesus descended from his maternal grandmother Saint Anne. According to this tradition, St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was grandmother not just to Jesus but also to five of the twelve apostles: John the Evangelist, James the Greater, James the Less, Simon and Jude. These apostles, together with John the Baptist, were all cousins of Jesus. The genealogy holds that Anne’s sister, Hismeria, was the mother of John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth and of a second child, Eliud, who was in turn the grandfather of Servatius of Tongeren.
The basis for this family tree rests upon the trinubium, the tradition that Anne had married three times. The exact lineage, as laid out in Jacobus da Varagine’s Golden Legend, runs thus:
The first theologian to set forth the concept of the trinubium was Haymo of Halberstadt in his Historiae sacrae epitome, in which he outlined the family tree described above.Gallery
