The Mystical marriage of Saint Catherine

Bernardino Luini's Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, painted around 1520, depicts the mystical vision in which the young Catherine received a ring from the Christ Child, becoming his spiritual bride — one of the most tender and devotionally appealing subjects in the catalogue of Marian and saintly imagery. Luini was the most productive of the Leonardeschi — the Milanese painters who absorbed Leonardo's manner and transmitted it to a wider audience — and his combination of Leonardesque sfumato with a sweetness of expression perfectly suited devotional subjects like this mystical marriage. His figures have the soft, internally illuminated quality of Leonardo's own sacred figures, filtered through a warmer, more accessible sentiment that made his work enormously popular and extensively copied in the following centuries. The Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan holds one of the finest private collection museums in Italy, assembled by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli in the nineteenth century with particular strength in Lombard and Venetian Renaissance painting, and Luini's mystical marriage is among its most characteristic and beloved works.

The devotional composition is rendered with attention to the expressive and contemplative qualities that served the painting's function as an aid to prayer and meditation.