Ring

Ring is a subject in art. The gallery holds 76 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Lorenzo Lotto and Henri Regnault.

Few objects carry as much symbolic weight in Western art as the ring. As an unbroken circle it reads instantly as eternity, fidelity, and unending bond, and artists have exploited that geometry for millennia. The signet ring is older still as a motif: from roughly 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia and Egypt, engraved seals pressed into clay and wax authenticated documents and goods, so that by the Middle Ages a ring bearing a crest or coat of arms had become shorthand for identity, lineage, and legal authority—an attribute painters could place on a sitter's hand to signal office and rank.

The ring's richest pictorial life belongs to the iconography of betrothal. Renaissance jewellers produced fede rings of clasped hands and interlocking gimmel ("twin") bands worn separately by an engaged couple and joined at the wedding, and painters made the giving of the ring the dramatic pivot of marriage scenes. Raphael's Sposalizio (The Marriage of the Virgin, 1504, Pinacoteca di Brera) centres the entire composition on Joseph slipping the ring onto the Virgin's finger, a sacramental gesture echoing his master Perugino.

Religious art transposed the same motif into the mystical key. The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, drawn from medieval legend, shows the infant Christ, held by the Virgin, placing a ring on the kneeling saint's finger; the gallery's Saint Catherine by Lorenzo Lotto (active 1520s) belongs to this tradition, as do celebrated versions by Parmigianino, Beccafumi, and Poussin, in which the small gold band becomes the devotional focus of an otherwise crowded canvas.

The ring also served civic and worldly ends. Venice ritualized it in the Marriage of the Sea, codified after 1177, when the doge cast a consecrated gold ring from the ceremonial barge Bucintoro into the Adriatic, declaring "we wed thee, sea, in sign of true and perpetual dominion"—a rite painted by Canaletto and Guardi until the Republic fell in 1797. In portraiture, the band on a sitter's hand quietly announced marriage and status, as in John Singleton Copley's Mrs. John Winthrop and Cecilia Beaux's Mr. and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes, while jewelled rings adorn figures from Titian's Venus with a Mirror (c. 1555) to Henri Regnault's Salome. From memento mori and mourning rings of the vanitas age to Pre-Raphaelite love tokens, the ring endures as one of art's most concentrated emblems of union, power, and mortality.