The image of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Saint Anne is so common in Renaissance art, it hurts.

When Dürer decided that he wanted to paint yet another Anna selbdritt, which means “Anne in a group of three,” he decided that he was going to go a bit darker with this one. Instead of the loving scene by Leonardo da Vinci of Saint Anne and Mary with Christ and a lamb near some rocks, think more of Michelangelo’s Pieta, with Saint Anne comforting Mary as she gazes at Jesus sleeping, who’s looking much like he would later in life on the cross.

During the sixteenth century, Germans loved Saint Anne so much that they devoted a whole cult to the veneration of this saint, the mother of the Virgin Mary. German artists made countless variations on the arrangement of Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus. Dürer was no stranger to this particular image. Although it’s still creepy, this work by Dürer is one of the more normal ones, in terms of proportion. Usually, artists painted Saint Anne larger-than-life, holding pint-sized versions of Mary and Jesus on either her knees or shoulders.

In this painting, Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and baby Jesus all appear to be of normal human size. (Is that too much to ask?) But most of all, Dürer wanted these holy people to seem like they existed in the same time as his German viewers. To do so, he made them look like contemporary Germans, using his wife Agnes as the model for Anne. It’s purely coincidental that the image of the “generic sixteenth-century German baby” looks like Ham from "The Sandlot."

While this painting was definitely not made any time near the 1990s, many supposed works by Albrecht Dürer have been suspect to questions of authenticity, including this one. Rumors of fakes have been floating around since the time Dürer was working. After a competitor copied Dürer’s infamous monogram, he was the first artist to enforce copyright law after taking the forger to court.

This painting hasn’t caught a break since the time of its creation. Nuremberg patrician Leonhard Tucher most likely commissioned the piece, and it stayed in his family for about a century. Despite having rejected the painting the first time he saw it on grounds of its authenticity, Maximilian I, elector of Bavaria, purchased the painting in 1630. Then, it floated around various rich Germans until an art dealer named Joseph Duveen brought it to the United States in 1911, when retail magnate Benjamin Altman bought it. Altman provided the work’s final resting place, giving it to the Met upon his death in 1913. For a while, scholars widely accepted Dürer as its author until a man named Claus Grimm stirred up drama in 2002, claiming that Dürer's workshop actually painted it based on drawings by the master. But the Met swears that he painted it.

No matter who painted it, this work was part of Benjamin Altman’s expertly-curated art collection, which included thirteen works by Rembrandt and many other old masters. Altman was a strong, silent type, and he loved art more than most other things. His donation helped the Met build the collection that it boasts today.