The Holy Kinship was the extended family of Jesus descended from his maternal grandmother Saint Anne from her trinubium or three marriages.

The group were a popular subject in religious art throughout Germany and the Low Countries, especially during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but rarely after the Council of Trent.

The first theologian to set forth the concept of the trinubium was Haymo of Halberstadt in his Historiae sacrae epitome, in which he outlined the family tree described above.

The Council of Trent dismissed the legend of the three marriages of Anne, and the full subject was thereafter rarely painted, although the limited group of the families of the cousins Jesus and John the Baptist remained in use.

[3] The exact lineage, as laid out in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (Latin: Legenda Aurea), runs thus: Extra figures may relate to a local Dutch legendary genealogy which held that Anne’s sister, Hismeria (or Esmeria), was the mother of John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth and of a second child, Eliud, who was in turn the grandfather of Servatius of Tongeren, a 4th-century bishop in the Netherlands.