The mystical wedding of St. Catherine of Siena (Lazio)

Archconfraternity of St. Catherine of Siena

The mystical wedding of St. Catherine of Siena represents a particular example of the passage between the incomparable Roman “baroque” and the advancing classicism. The painting, the work of the painter Gaetano Lapis, was commissioned and executed in order to adorn the new Church of the Archconfraternity, built between 1767 and 1775 and inaugurated at the end of that Holy Year. It depicts with great pictorial sensitivity one of the fundamental moments of the mystical life of the Sienese saint. Catherine had developed in her youthful soul, after the vow of virginity with which she had offered herself to God, the holy desire to obtain the gift of the "perfection of the virtue of faith". As told in the Legenda Maior, the biography of the Saint, by Beato Raimondo da Capua, her confessor, the Virgin sought «with prayers and fasts the face of the eternal Spouse […]. Thus the Lord, in the days close to Lent, appeared to her to say: “I will marry you to me in faith” ». The painting by Lapis skilfully recounts this "mystical fact", making all the figures in the field plastically emerge - in the foreground, in full light, Christ and Catherine - through the harmonious sequences that arise from a perfect modulation of the chromatic planes: all these are traces of a rapid approach to the canons of Neoclassicism, in harmony with the architecture of the Church. And the beautiful golden frame that adorns the canvas, supported by intertwined palms and dominated by a glory of cherubs, seems to want to solemnly celebrate the "mystical wedding".