Raphael's The Marriage of the Virgin shows a scene that appears in no Gospel. An old carpenter named Joseph is chosen as Mary's husband because, of all her suitors, only his rod flowers overnight. Raphael painted it in 1504, at twenty one, for a Franciscan church in Città di Castello.
It stayed over a side altar there until Napoleon's armies reached Italy. Today it hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
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Raphael did not invent this picture. Brera's own catalogue says he based it on an altarpiece by his teacher, Pietro Perugino, adopting its composition and its iconography, and describes the result as almost a mirror image of the master's.
Perugino's version was made for the cathedral of Perugia, and it already had the temple at the back, the priest in the middle and the rejected suitors beside Joseph. Raphael was twenty one, and he had been trained in that workshop.
I'd say the copy is the best thing about the panel. Set beside the teacher's, the student's version reads as a correction.
What You'll Discover
Where this wedding comes from.
Whose composition Raphael borrowed.
What the rejected suitor is doing.
How the temple was built.
What Raphael carved into the temple.