The Marriage of the Virgin by Pietro Perugino

The Marriage of the Virgin by Pietro Perugino

Joseph’s flowering rod

The priest stands at the centre joining the hands of Mary, on the left, and Joseph, on the right, who holds a staff that has burst into flower. According to legend, the suitors for Mary’s hand each brought a rod to the temple, and only Joseph’s blossomed. Behind him, a disappointed young suitor breaks his own rod across his knee.

A temple in a piazza

The couple stand in the foreground of a vast, empty square paved in a perspective grid that runs back to a centrally planned temple with a domed roof. The architecture is the real subject of the picture’s design: calm, symmetrical, measured.

Where Raphael began

Perugino was the most admired painter in Italy around 1500, and his young pupil Raphael painted the same subject for Città di Castello in 1504 — clearly working from this composition, but loosening it, deepening the space and making the temple rounder and the crowd more graceful. Raphael’s version, now in the Brera in Milan, is the more famous; this is the picture it answers.

Where it hangs

The panel is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen and measures 234 by 185 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 3,327-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 22 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen · Wikidata Q3224308 · Wikimedia Commons