Saint Catherine of Alexandria

The wheel that names her

Western painting identifies Saint Catherine of Alexandria by a broken wheel. The convention is old and stable: the wheel is the instrument of the torture her legend describes, and once it stands beside a young woman in a picture, no caption is needed — the object is the caption. A sword and a martyr's palm travel with her for the same reason. The title of this work already does that naming, and it also settles a confusion worth naming out loud: this is Catherine of Alexandria, not Catherine of Siena, a different saint with a different set of attributes and a different century.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives 1598 as the date of creation and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid as the present location. The dimensions are 173 x 133 cm — a canvas sized to be met standing, not held in the hand. It is filed under Religion and under female portraiture, with Baroque and Tenebrism given as its styles, and the measured colour family of the image is indigo.

What the style label means

Tenebrism, the second style term on this entry, names a way of building a picture almost entirely out of shadow, with light admitted narrowly and used to select what the eye is allowed to find. On a saint's image that method has a practical effect: it tends to leave the attribute — the wheel, the blade, the palm — as one of the few things the light reaches.