The Marriage of the Virgin is the subject in Christian art depicting the marriage of the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph. The wedding ceremony is not mentioned in the canonical Gospels but is covered in several apocryphal sources and in later redactions, notably the 14th-century compilation the Golden Legend. Unlike many other scenes in Life of the Virgin cycles (like the Nativity of Mary and Presentation of Mary), it is not a feast in the church calendar, though it sometimes has been in the past.
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, essentially the same scene, with very similar iconography, is considered to represent the earlier scene of the "Entrusting of Mary to Joseph", with Joseph being made Mary's guardian by the temple authorities.
In art the subject could be covered in several different scenes, and the betrothal of Mary, with Joseph's blossoming rod, was often shown, despite its apocryphal origin. The wedding procession may also be shown, especially in the Early Medieval period. Giotto's famous fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel (1303) covers the story in four scenes. By the later Middle Ages and Renaissance the betrothal and marriage were often shown as a single scene, with the disappointed suitors holding their bare rods, or snapping them.
The lack of scriptural backing for the details, and the fall from fashion of predelle, led to it falling into disfavour in the Counter-Reformation.
The feast for the Espousals of the Blessed Virgin Mary, now only celebrated by some parts of the Catholic Church, is on January 23.
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Transcription
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're in the Brera in Milan, and we're looking at an important early Raphael. DR. BETH HARRIS: Raphael's in his early 20s when he paints this, and the subject is The Marriage of the Virgin. And it's taken from a book called The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Now, this is a medieval book that basically tries to fill in all the missing stories in the Bible. I mean, if you think about this deeply religious Christian culture, they look to the Bible to understand the sacred story. But there are so many omissions. There are so many things that are missing that people created the glue to tie the stories together. DR. BETH HARRIS: And that's what's collected in the book we know today as The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So this story is about the marriage of the Virgin Mary to Saint Joseph. And the story says that there were a number of people that wanted to marry Mary. DR. BETH HARRIS: She had many suitors. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And each of these suitors had a rod, and that she would be married to the one whose rod flowered. DR. BETH HARRIS: Miraculously flowered. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Needless to say. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so they went to the temple, and the man whose rod flowered was Joseph. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And we can see that in this painting. Joseph, who's got that wonderful yellow drape over his shoulder and around his waist, is putting a ring tenderly on the Virgin Mary's finger. And he holds in his left hand a rod that indeed has leaves at its end. DR. BETH HARRIS: And there are other suitors behind him you can see have rods without flowers on the end. And one suitor in the front is annoyed, has decided to break the rod on his knee. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: This wonderful human narrative quality here, this is not just the sacred event. But it really is enacting it before us as a kind of performance. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so right in the center, we have a priest marrying Mary and Joseph. And the painting is so symmetrical in so many ways with that temple behind. And we have this rationally constructed perspective space. And that priest is in the middle between Mary and Joseph, but he tips his head a little bit, so he's just off center. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: In fact, there's a little bit of the chaos of the crowd that people are moving this way and that, that people are focusing here and there. DR. BETH HARRIS: This painting is often compared to an early Renaissance painting by Raphael's teacher, Perugino, The Giving of the Keys to St. Peter. And you can begin to see here in this early work by Raphael indications of what we understand now as the High Renaissance style, as opposed to a kind of stiffness of the 15th century, of the early Renaissance. Raphael gives us figures who seem to move very easily and elegantly. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So make no mistake. This is a painting that is still clearly indebted to Perugino. But I think you're absolutely right. Raphael is beginning to step out of his master's shadow. He signed the painting, and if you look very closely at the front of the temple, you can see it says Raphael Urbinus, Raphael from Urbino. And there is a beautiful sense of elegance, especially in the Virgin Mary. She is painted so tenderly. DR. BETH HARRIS: And she stands in a lovely contrapposto, tilts her head down. There's that typical Raphael sweetness. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So whereas the early Renaissance so often was trying to reveal the truths of what we see of the world that we live in, here there's an attempt to perfect, to create a kind of balanced, harmonious representation of an ideal, Heavenly place. DR. BETH HARRIS: Ideal beauty, perfection, harmony are qualities we associate with the High Renaissance. And we see that in the background of this painting. If we follow the linear perspective system and we track the orthogonals created by those paving stones behind the frieze of figures in the front, we see a centrally planned temple in the background, a form that was considered ideal by the architects and the artists of the High Renaissance. We can think of Bramante, for example, and his Tempietto. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's a spectacular building. And I love the way that the linear perspective leads our eye back there past the frieze of figures in the foreground. And then our eyes are allowed to move around that arcade that's occupied by those smaller figures. But then my eye goes back to the doorway and then through the building to the doorway on its far side and to the sky that's revealed beyond even that. And there is that diminishment of the scale of the one doorway and then the farther doorway giving us a real sense of the completeness of this space. DR. BETH HARRIS: There's a real love of creating an illusion of space and the way that the sizes of the figure shift as we move further back into space. We have this real harmony here that I think is very typical of the High Renaissance between the architecture and the figures where one ennoble another, where one is as ideal and perfect as the other. It's this High Renaissance moment, although the very beginnings. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And of course, we're looking with hindsight as to what will happen. [MUSIC PLAYING]
The betrothal in the Golden Legend
The Golden Legend, which derives its account from the much older Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, recounts how, when Mary was 14 and living in the Temple, the High Priest gathered all male descendants of David of marriageable age including Saint Joseph. The High Priest ordered them to each bring a rod; he that owned the rod which would bear flowers was divinely ordained to become Mary's husband. After the Holy Spirit descended as a dove and caused Joseph's rod to blossom, he and Mary were wed according to Jewish custom. The account, quoted in its entirety, runs thus:
When [Mary] had come to her fourteenth year, the high priest announced to all that the virgins who were reared in the Temple, and who had reached the age of their womanhood, should return to their own, and be given in lawful marriage. The rest obeyed the command, and Mary alone answered that this she could not do, both because her parents had dedicated her to the service of the Lord, and because she herself had vowed her virginity to God.... When the high priest went in to take counsel with God, a voice came forth from the oratory for all to hear, and it said that of all the marriageable men of the house of David who had not yet taken a wife, each should bring a branch and lay it upon the altar, that one of the branches would burst into flower and upon it the Holy Ghost would come to rest in the form of a dove, according to the prophecy of Isaias, and that he to whom this branch belonged would be the one to whom the virgin should be espoused. Joseph was among the men who came.... [and he] placed a branch upon the altar, and straightaway it burst into bloom, and a dove came from Heaven and perched at its summit; whereby it was manifest to all that the Virgin was to become the spouse of Joseph.
In fact, neither the Golden Legend nor any of the early apocryphal accounts describe the actual ceremony, and they differ as to its timing, other than that it preceded the "Journey to Bethlehem". It is unclear whether this story was set before or after the Annunciation which, in the New Testament account, occurred after their betrothal but before their marriage. In the Gospel of James it comes after the Annunciation, but in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the primary source in the West, it comes before it.[1]
Artists
The scene, or scenes, was a common component in larger cycles of the Life of the Virgin and thus very frequently found, especially in the Middle Ages; it is not found in the typical cycle in a Book of hours however. It was often a predella scene underneath the main scene in an altarpiece centred on Mary,
The marriage scene has been painted by, among others, Giotto, Perugino, Raphael, Ventura Salimbeni (1613, his last painting), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1485-1490, at the Tornabuoni Chapel), Bernardo Daddi (now in the Royal Collection), Pieter van Lint (1640, Antwerp Cathedral), Tiburzio Baldini, Alfonso Rivarola, Francesco Caccianiga, Niccolò Berrettoni, Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio, Filippo Bellini, Veronese (in San Polo church, Venice), Giulio Cesare Milani, Franciabigio (in the Santissima Annunziata, Florence), and Giacomo di Castro.[2]
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Giotto, c 1305 -
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1485–90, at the Tornabuoni Chapel) -
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Betrothal of the Virgin, Rosso Fiorentino, 1523
References
- ^ The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, G. Ryan and H. Rippergar (editors), New York and London, 1941, pages 204-205
- ^ Iconology of Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin: A Study Archived 2009-01-06 at the Wayback Machine
External links
- Aquinas, Thomas. "Summa Theologica III q29. Of the espousals of the Mother of God"
- Sansonvino, Andrea. The Wedding, marble sculpture, Loretto, Italy, (1526)
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This page was last edited on 24 December 2023, at 17:52