The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine

In 1529 Sodoma recovered a group of paintings that one of his own assistants had stolen from him, and the list of what came back includes an unfinished Marriage of Saint Catherine with Saint Jerome. Whether it was this panel no one can say. The size given in the list does not quite match, and the museum dates the picture to the end of the 1530s, around the time he moved to Pisa in the autumn of 1539. The saint named in that list matters all the same. The old man in red on the right, a witness to the marriage, was always taken for Joseph, and a recent study proposes Jerome instead, because a cardinal's hat seems to show on his shoulder. At the centre the Child, standing on his mother's knees, slips the ring onto Catherine's finger, and in the lower left corner her spiked wheel gives off a flash of metal. A cartoon of about the same size survives in Munich, and it matches the painting in every detail except the Child, who in the drawing is plumper and livelier. The bare patches across the surface are not a sign that the work was left unfinished. They come from cleanings that went too far, which removed most of the haloes, the pergola behind the figures and the glazes on the old man.