Saint Cecilia

The saint identified by sound

Cecilia is named by music. The convention gives her an instrument — most often a small portative organ, sometimes a viol, a lute or a spinet — and it is stable enough that an instrument in the hands of a young woman in a devotional picture is read as her name. It is one of the few attributes in the system that refers to something a saint is said to have done rather than to something done to her. 7 titles in this collection name Cecilia, and the instrument varies across them while the identification does not.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1895 and gives the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under group portraiture and Religion, with Romanticism as the style and British as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

A late date, and a group tag

By 1895 an image of an early Christian martyr is not an altarpiece. It is an exhibition picture, made for a public that read such subjects as antiquity rather than as liturgy, and the attributes survive that change intact — the instrument still names her. The record files the work under group portraiture although the title names one figure, which means the composition holds others the title does not account for. Who they are is not recorded, and this page does not guess.