Sofonisba Anguissola - The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine

The work shows the episode of the mystic marriage between Christ and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, as reported by Jacobus de Varagine in his The Golden Legend. Saint Catherine. The date of the work, 1588, indicates that it was painted in Genoa, the city where Sofonisba Anguissola lived between 1580 and 1615, when she enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle that enabled her to devote herself fully to painting. This leads us to believe that this was where she directly encountered the work by the same name by Luca Cambiaso - one of the top representatives of the Genoese school - which she faithfully reproduced on the canvas that now joins the collection of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. The artist may have been interested in this new iconography, which shows a Christ Child grown and very strongly resembling his mother, which humanises his figure and gives him a more important role in the scene.