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.
Where does this wedding come from?
From a book the Church never accepted. The marriage of Mary and Joseph first appears in the Protoevangelium of James, an early Christian text outside the Bible, and it reached medieval Europe through Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend.
In that story Mary grows up in the Temple in Jerusalem. When she comes of age, the high priest gathers the eligible men and asks each to bring a rod. Joseph resists. He tells the priest that he is an old man with children and that she is only a girl. The rods are left overnight, and his is the one that flowers.
The miracle was borrowed from the Hebrew Bible, where Aaron's rod flowers to mark God's choice. In the Book of James a dove also flies out of Joseph's rod and settles on his head.
Umbria gave the story an extra object. Joseph slips a ring onto Mary's finger, and the cathedral of Perugia claimed to own that very ring.
What You'll Discover
Whose composition Raphael borrowed.
What the rejected suitor is doing.
How the temple was built.
What Raphael carved into the temple.