Matrimonio mistico di santa Caterina d'Alessandria con Niccolò Bonghi

Lorenzo Lotto painted this in 1523, during the years he spent in Bergamo, far from the Venice where he had trained. The man at the left, half in shadow behind the Virgin, is Niccolò Bonghi, a local merchant who commissioned the picture and, by tradition, was also Lotto's landlord. So the donor kneeling here is the man who rented the painter his rooms. The scene itself is the mystical marriage of Saint Catherine, the vision in which the infant Christ slips a ring onto her finger and she gives up an earthly husband for a consecrated life. Lotto sets it not in a gold heaven but in a warm domestic interior, the kind of room Bonghi himself might have lived in.