Presentation of Christ in the Temple

The fortieth day in the Temple

The Presentation is the episode in Luke where the infant Christ is brought to the Temple in Jerusalem for the rite of purification, and the aged Simeon takes him in his arms. It is the scene of the Nunc dimittis, and of Anna the prophetess. Iconographically it is fixed by the altar, the two doves brought as the offering of the poor, and the old man holding the child.

Its position in the cycle

It closes the infancy sequence that opened with the Nativity and the Circumcision, and it is the last scene before the flight into Egypt. It is also the first moment in the cycle in which the Passion is named out loud: Simeon speaks of a sword, and painters treated the episode as a hinge between the joyful scenes and the sorrowful ones.

What the catalogue records

The entry gives Simon Vouet, 1641, and the Louvre in Paris. The dimensions are large — 393 by 250 centimetres — an upright canvas at altarpiece scale rather than a devotional picture. The artist is recorded as French. The subject fields class the work as a group figure composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre and red. No patron, church of origin, or later ownership appears in the record, so none is stated.