Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine

In 1926 the critic Lionello Venturi proposed Liberale da Verona as the painter of this panel. He also recalled a passage by Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of artists, about a Madonna with the Child marrying Saint Catherine in the house of Vincenzo de' Medici in Verona, while admitting the match could not be proved. Later critics rejected it, since this picture does not show the mystic marriage at all. Vasari also says that Liberale painted many pictures for brides, and this panel is thought to belong to that kind of work, made for devotion at home.

Bernard Berenson accepted Liberale, but the specialist Hans-Joachim Eberhardt in 1974 listed the panel only among works traditionally attributed to him. The gallery's catalogue entry keeps the name and dates it to about 1480 to 1490, after Liberale's long years in Siena, comparing the Virgin's tilted head with the Madonna of his Adoration of the Magi in Verona cathedral. The veined marble parapet and the cloth hung like a tent from a curved cord behind the figures come back in his Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Canossa collection.