Holy Kinship was a popular theme in religious art throughout Germany and the Low Countries, especially during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The term refers to the extended family of Jesus descended from his maternal grandmother St. Anne. According to this tradition, St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was grandmother not just to Jesus but also to five of the twelve apostles: John the Evangelist, James the Greater, James the Less, Simon and Jude. These apostles, together with John the Baptist, were all cousins of Jesus. The genealogy holds 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 St. Servatius.