Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Two Catherines, one wheel

Catherine of Alexandria is identified by a broken wheel, with a sword and a martyr's palm often added. Catherine of Siena is a different woman of a different century, and her signs are different: a lily, a crown of thorns, a book, sometimes the stigmata. Nothing but the attribute separates them in a picture, which is why this title spells out of Alexandria. It is the record doing, in words, what the wheel does in paint.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1615 and gives the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, US as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under female portraiture and Religion, with Baroque as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is neutral.

A neutral reading

A colour family given as neutral is worth pausing on, because it says the measurement found no dominant hue. In a catalogue where brown is the most frequently measured family by a wide margin, a neutral reading describes an image whose weight is carried by tone rather than by colour. The same collection in Hartford also holds a Caravaggio entry in this catalogue, dated 1595 — the two are neighbours on one shelf and roughly a generation apart in date.