Marriage of the Virgin

Marriage of the Virgin is a panel painting by Pietro Perugino, dated to around 1501-1504 and made for the chapel of the Holy Ring in the cathedral of Perugia, which housed the relic of Mary's wedding ring. The commission was first given to Pinturicchio, but Perugino took it over and completed the altarpiece. After Napoleon's seizure, the panel was carried off to Caen, where it remains; efforts by Perugia to recover it came to nothing. The scene shows the betrothal of Joseph and Mary before a priest, and at the centre rises an octagonal building on a centralised plan, a reference to the Temple in Jerusalem. Perugino organises the space with a floor of strongly marked squares that drive the perspective, and with a symmetrical arrangement in which Joseph and the men stand on one side and the Virgin and the women on the other. The architecture follows the classical ideals promoted by Alberti's treatises, and the heavy, luminous drapery shows the saturated colour the artist learned in Florence. The distant hills fading toward the horizon complete a key work of the Italian Renaissance, whose layout Raphael would later surpass in his own version of the subject.

Painter

Pietro Perugino

Date

1501

Medium

oil paint, panel

Dimensions

234 × 185 cm

Museum

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Caen

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Saint Joseph, Mary, woman

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