The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine

A title that names a Catherine, but not which one

Two saints named Catherine are constantly mistaken for each other, and the whole point of an attribute system is to keep them apart. Catherine of Alexandria carries a broken wheel, a sword and a martyr's palm. Catherine of Siena is given the Dominican habit, a lily, a crown of thorns. This title supplies neither name nor object — it names an ecstasy and stops. Where the record is silent, the identification is unresolved, and nothing here resolves it. In this collection 27 titles carry the name Catherine, and most of them do specify.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1590 and gives the Borghese Gallery in Rome as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under group portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Baroque as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is ochre.

Why an ecstasy is hard to label

An ecstasy is a state rather than an event, and it gives a painter almost nothing to put in a figure's hands. That is precisely the situation the attribute system was built for and the situation in which it works least well: the object that would name her has no natural place in the scene. The catalogue's own filing — group portraiture rather than narrative — is a fair reading of a picture organised around figures instead of an incident.