O Casamento Místico de Santa Catarina

Veronese was barely twenty, still working in his home town of Verona, when he painted this, years before Venice would make him famous for enormous, crowded banquet scenes. The subject is itself a marriage. The infant Christ, held by his mother, slips a ring onto the finger of Saint Catherine, the early Christian scholar who took him as her only bridegroom. High in the upper left corner two coats of arms are joined together. They belong to the Della Torre and Pindemonte families, two aristocratic houses of Verona, and they mark a real wedding that bound the two families in 1547, the year this picture was made.