Holy Family with the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

Holy Family with the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Tommaso d’Antonio Manzuoli, called Maso da San Friano (Italian, 1531–1571).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The marriage shown in this painting is called “mystic” because it was a purely symbolic. The infant Jesus places a ring on the finger of Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century saint who had a vision of dedicating herself to God and remaining a virgin instead of marrying. Note the otherworldly quality of the women and children’s elegant faces, compared to the naturalism of elderly Saint Joseph, who may be a likeness of someone the artist knew.

Object facts

• Title: Holy Family with the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine
• Date: c. 1560
• Creator attribution: Tommaso d’Antonio Manzuoli, called Maso da San Friano (Italian, 1531–1571)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on panel
• Dimensions: Image: 148 x 103 cm (58 1/4 x 40 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2019.168

A detail from the museum

Saint Catherine is usually shown with a spiked wheel; here, it is barely visible below her hand.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "New in the Galleries." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 60, no. 1 (January/February 2020): Back cover.
• Grant, Daniel. "Top museum acquisitions: 2019 in review." The Catalogue of Antiques & Fine Art." 19, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 96-105.
• Korkow, Cory. “Acquisitions 2019: European Paintings and Sculpture, 1500-1800.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 60, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 16.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.