The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine

Lorenzo Lotto was still a young man around 1506 when he painted this quiet scene of the Christ Child slipping a ring onto the finger of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The story behind it is a dream. A hermit had shown Catherine an image of the Virgin and Child and told her to take Christ as her husband, and in her sleep the infant Christ placed a ring on her hand. It was a subject young women of the day were especially drawn to. Catherine's usual emblem, the spiked wheel she was condemned to and which broke apart, lies shattered in the foreground. Lotto signed his own name on one of its broken staves.