Getty Museum
Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John
Creator
Frederick SommerAmerican Photographer · 1905–1999
All works by this person →The son of a city planner, Frederick Sommer was trained as an architect in Brazil. He began to exhibit his drawings in Brazil while still a teenager. His work was so accomplished that he was accepted to the architecture department at Cornell University, though he had not received an undergraduate degree and did not yet speak English. Sommer purchased his first camera around 1931 while he was in Sw
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1966
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Comprised of an illustration torn from an old children's book and a lump of hardened molten metal from a burned-out automobile, this photograph by Frederick Sommer is titled after Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the same name. The amorphous shape laid on top of an anonymous lithograph of a figure seated in the woods next to a basket closely resembles the outline of the Madonna and Child from the fifteenth-century drawing. The smiling head of a boy emerging from the foliage becomes the infant Saint John. In the union of an abstract object with unrelated representational imagery, Sommer has made an art historical reference that is both literal and spiritual.
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