Antonio Vivarini
The Marriage of St. Monica
1441
Tempera on panel, 18.1 x 12.2 in. (46 x 31 cm.)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
This image of the marriage of St. Monica is set in a domestic courtyard, not a church. Dudley (211) explains how a typical marriage was performed in Italy in the Middle Ages:
The union already had been negotiated[,] and a notary, not a priest elicited express acquiescence from those to be married in the form required by the Church. Then the notary drew the woman's right hand toward her husband, and he placed the nuptial ring on her right ring finger. The betrothed couple was considered married after this…
In the painting the notary reaches for Monica's right hand, just as Dudley describes. Of course, the marriage of the actual Monica, 11 centuries before the painting, would have taken a different form.
The phrase the painter has placed below the scene, "how St. Monica was given to her husband by her father and mother," reflects the sentence in the Confessions (IX, 9): "She arrived at a marriageable age, and she was given to a husband whom she served as her lord."
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Photographed at the site by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.