Photo: Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

The Portal of St. Anne was the first of the three west portals to be installed (c.1200). Its tympanum is an earlier Romanesque work dating from about 1150. Anne is the Virgin Mary's mother, who is mentioned in early Christian stories but not in the Bible. The tympanum shows the Virgin and Child on a throne, accompanied by two censing angels, a bishop and his assistant, and a king. The upper lintel depicts scenes from the advent of Christ (Annunciation, Nativity, Magi, etc.) and the lower lintel tells the stories of Anne and Joachim and Mary and Joseph. On the trumeau is a statue of Saint Marcel, a 5th-century bishop of Paris, who is vanquishing a dragon symbolising the scourges with which his diocese was cursed. Statues of Peter, Paul, and biblical monarchs (all remade in the 19th century) are on the door jambs.

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