Carlo Crivelli, 'Saint Catherine of Alexandria', probably about 1491-4

This graceful golden-haired princess comes from a predella, a row of scenes along the bottom of an altarpiece or from the frame of an altarpiece. She is Saint Catherine, shown with her traditional attributes of a spiked wheel and a cactus-like martyr’s palm.

Crivelli liked spatial games, playing with our knowledge that we are looking at a flat painted surface on which he has created an illusion of three-dimensional space. Here Catherine stands in a curved marble recess, rather like a statue. We can see her shadow on the wall behind her. To show off his skill with foreshortening Crivelli has shown her wheel sideways on, with its spokes receding at a sharp angle. Her skirts fall in heavy folds around her feet, and the toe of her shoe peeps out over the edge of marble parapet, as if she is breaking out of the flat panel into our space. To her left a fly seems to walk across the picture, casting its own shadow on the flat surface and reminding us that this is just a painting.

According to legend, Catherine was a scholarly Christian princess who lived in Alexandria under Roman rule. When she asked the Roman Emperor to stop persecuting Christians, he sent his best philosophers to debate with her and to try to persuade her to revert to paganism. They failed and many converted to Christianity on the strength of Catherine’s arguments. The Emperor then asked her to marry him. When she refused, he had her tortured on a wheel and finally beheaded.

Another panel from the same altarpiece is also in our collection: Mary Magdalene.