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Arbor Anna fructuosa. Apropos of an Image of Saint Anne and the Fruits of Redemption, Page 1 of 1
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This essay examines a small anonymous wooden sculpture produced in the eighteenth century in north-eastern Brazil. Of rare iconography, the sculpture depicts a Selbdritt in which Saint Anne offers a bowl of apples to the Child while the group is framed by a laden apple tree. The overt emphasis placed on the tree and the offering of fruits encouraged the search for its formal prototypes and their meaning. Thus, I present the apples and the apple tree (and other trees and fruits) in Marian and Saint Anne iconography and compare this visual material with an extensive literary corpus that encompasses biblical text, Christological-Mariological literature, liturgical hymns, paraenetics, and folk songs, highlighting its occurrences in the Lusophone world. Finally, after briefly specifying the sociocultural context of eighteenth-century Brazilian artistic production, I conclude that the sculpture can be understood as a late repository of the multiple debates that permeated the construction of Mary and Anne characters as a support for what constitutes the very essence of Christianity — and of which the apples and the apple tree are the figurative synthesis: the path of humanity from the fall from grace to redemption.
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