The Roman Empress Faustina Visiting Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Prison

The other Catherine, and her wheel

Catherine of Alexandria is identified by a broken wheel, a sword and a martyr's palm — a different set entirely from that of Catherine of Siena, who wears a Dominican habit and is given a lily. The title recorded here names Alexandria explicitly, which is the cleanest kind of evidence a catalogue can offer for a subject that is otherwise easy to misfile.

An episode rather than a portrait

The title also names a scene rather than a figure: the empress Faustina visiting the saint in prison. This belongs to the narrative half of hagiographic painting, where the identifying object recedes and the story carries the picture. In a prison subject the attribute has nowhere natural to sit — a wheel is not prison furniture — so identification passes to the title, to the second figure, and to whatever the setting supplies.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1643 and gives the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, as its location. No dimensions are recorded in this entry. It is filed under Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Tenebrism as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown. Tenebrism — a picture built from darkness with light admitted narrowly — is a method a prison scene can use directly rather than as a stylistic choice.