The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine

The title does not say which Catherine

A mystic marriage is a subject, not a name. It is attached to Catherine of Alexandria, whose sign is a broken wheel, and it is also attached to Catherine of Siena, whose signs are a lily, a book, a crown of thorns and, in some traditions, the stigmata. Two women, two centuries, one episode, and a title that says only Saint Catherine. In a picture the attribute settles it. In a catalogue entry that records neither the wheel nor the lily, nothing settles it.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1521 and gives the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under group portraiture, cultural heritage and religious cultural heritage, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour families are brown and red.

What the neighbouring entries show, and what they do not

This painter appears four times in this catalogue. The other three titles all name Catherine of Siena explicitly; this one does not. That is a fact about the titles, and it is worth stating exactly as such — it is not evidence about which Catherine this work shows, and no identification is made here. 27 titles in the collection carry the name; the ambiguity is structural, not local.