Marriage of The Virgin by Raffaello

In one of the most important museums in Milan, the Pinacoteca di Brera, in the neighbourhood of the same name, you can admire, alongside masterpieces by Mantegna, Bellini, Caravaggio and Hayez, a jewel of Renaissance art, The marriage of the Virgin by Raffaello (1504).

Born under the influence of the master Perugino, who had painted a composition of the same name the year before, this work actually marks, with some slight but significant changes, the beginning of the artist’s maturity and stylistic identity.

The two spouses portrayed at the center of the scene together with the officiating priest, intent on exchanging rings, are Mary and Joseph, adorned with colorful robes and surrounded by a group of women and men attending the ceremony.

The episode is narrated in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of John, according to which Mary, after spending her childhood in the Temple of Jerusalem as a consecrated woman, was given in trust, and subsequently married, to the suitor whose staff showed a sign of the Lord’s presence. While the staffs of the other aspirants remained inert, as demonstrated by the figure on the right intent on breaking his own, which had dried up, Joseph’s staff blossomed (as can be seen from the floral detail on the tip) and shortly afterward a dove emerged from it, a sign of his blessing.

The entire composition is dominated by extreme proportion, harmony, grace and beauty.

As is typical of Raffaello, the faces of the characters do not betray intense emotions and the purpose of the work is not to describe the characters’ interiority but to represent the overall unity of what is unfolding before the viewer’s eyes: the marriage between Mary and Joseph, and its historical and spiritual significance with all that will ensue.

The optical center of the painting is in fact represented by the Temple in the background and in particular by the two open doors that allow a glimpse of the landscape behind and give the viewer the impression that what is being celebrated just below will find a natural continuation towards that infinite visual.

Pause to observe the rich colors of the characters’ clothes, the women’s hairstyles and the men’s hats, the perspective lines of the pavement, the slender temple that seems to attract the entire composition with its rays, the details of the clothes and the temple, perhaps compare Raffaello’s painting with the homonymous one by Perugino, his master.

Despite the similarities, you will find in this work a momentum, a dynamism and a softness of the bodies that make the young Raffaello a promise of Renaissance art.