Le Mariage mystique de sainte Catherine d'Alexandrie

Paolo Caliari was still a young man in Verona, barely into his twenties and not yet the Venetian celebrity he would become, when he painted this around 1550. The scene is a vision rather than an event: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a Christian noblewoman of the early Church, receives a wedding ring from the Christ child on the Virgin's lap, sealing a marriage understood as entirely spiritual. Even this early you can see what Venice would come to prize in him, the shimmer of costly fabric, the easy grandeur of the grouping, faces caught in soft exchange. The picture has hung at Yale since 1972, on long loan from a foundation, far from the city where the painter, soon known everywhere as Veronese after his home town, made his name.