The Miraculous Communion of Saint Catherine of Siena

Named by the episode, not by the object

Catherine of Siena is given the Dominican habit, a lily, a crown of thorns and, in a claim disputed within the tradition for centuries, the stigmata. None of those is what identifies her here. The title names a communion, and the picture is therefore an incident rather than a portrait: the saint is known by what is happening to her. This is the ordinary alternative to an attribute, and hagiographic painting runs on both.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1513 and gives the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under group portraiture, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

An artist who appears here only as her painter

This collection holds 4 works by this artist, and all 4 of them name a Catherine in the title. That is a fact about this catalogue rather than about a career — the collection is assembled around saints, so an artist enters it through the subjects that qualify. It is still worth stating, because it explains what a reader will find if they follow the artist's name out of this page: not a range of subjects, but the same saint approached repeatedly, in the same collection and within a few years of this date.