Raphael
NG 168 
Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Carol Plazzotta, 2024

Extracted from:
Carol Plazzotta and Tom Henry, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume IV, Raphael (London: The National Gallery, 2022).

c. 1507–8

Oil on wood, original panel size: 72 × 55.3–55.5 cm; overall height (including a strip that is not original at the bottom), 72.7–72.9 cm.

Inscriptions and seal

Inscribed bottom right, in white paint: 136 (Borghese inventory number; see under ‘Previous owners’ below).

On the reverse of the panel:

• 1. In the middle, slightly right of centre, upside down to the orientation of the panel, a red wax seal with the Crescenzi arms (fig. 1; see under ‘Previous owners’ below).
• 2. Interrupted by the top batten channel, a number or a combination of numbers and letters, in black paint.

Support¹

The panel, probably poplar based on its appearance, is made up of two members, vertical in grain: that on the right is wide (48.2 cm) while that on the left is narrower (maximum width 7.5 cm). The wood is smooth and tightly grained and has probably retained its original thickness of 1.2 cm since it is unlikely to have been thinned before the Crescenzi seal was applied to the back at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The painting has been trimmed on all four sides, but slightly more at the bottom (see under ‘Materials and technique’ below). Two heavy wooden battens, which may have been fitted in original batten channels in the nineteenth century, were removed in 1991 and the channels filled with balsa wood. A strip of wood, clearly not original, is attached to the bottom edge by five old square‐section nails (visible in the X‐radiograph), indicating it was added in the nineteenth century or earlier, probably when fitting the painting into a new frame.

Ground and priming

The gesso ground, identified as gypsum (calcium sulphate dihydrate) by FTIR microscopy, was prepared with a thin pale yellow priming composed of lead white, a small amount of lead‐tin yellow and colourless powdered glass (manganese‐containing soda‐lime type). Pinhead‐sized white spots visible in the X‐radiograph show where the priming filled air bubbles in the gesso ground during its application.

The top and side edges display a gesso barbe implying that the picture was originally painted in an engaged frame. Since there is no unpainted wood beyond the barbe the edges must have been trimmed up to the original paint edges on these three sides. The support has been trimmed more at the bottom edge where there is no sign of a barbe, and the paint has chipped and flaked away in places. There are traces of gold, probably from a former frame, along both lateral edges.

Underdrawing²

Saint Catherine of Alexandria is one of three paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery for which a cartoon survives (see also the Dream of a Knight [NG 213] and the Mackintosh Madonna [NG 2069]). Spolveri (dots formed by patting black powder through a pricked cartoon) were very hard to detect even with infrared reflectography (fig. 2) and it was only possible to establish the correlation between the cartoon in Paris (fig. 3; see under ‘Drawings’ below) and the underdrawing by mapping all the pricked holes in the cartoon on a tracing and carefully looking for the corresponding pounce marks in the infrared reflectogram.³ These were found in some of the contours, especially over the saint’s right shoulder and down the outlines of both sleeves. The pounced design is joined up, although it is not possible to deduce from the character of the line whether the drawing was carried out with a dry or fluid material (in other paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery, a liquid material was used). The use of the cartoon to transfer the design is further confirmed by the fact that every line in it that was pricked can be seen in the underdrawing, even where Raphael then went on to make changes in paint.

The painted composition extends about another 10 cm at the bottom compared to the cartoon. Infrared reflectography reveals no trace of pouncing in this area of the painting, but it is hard to tell whether the drawing has been cut along this lower edge or whether Raphael simply extended the design at the painting stage.

In addition to the underdrawing relating to the cartoon, there is also a considerable amount of freehand adjustment of the contours (in the saint’s face and neck for example) and drapery folds. Hills and landscape on both sides of the saint, which do not feature in the cartoon, were drawn in approximately, freehand, with a straight edge used to rule some of the rooftops. What looks like pouncing along the edge of one of the shadows on the left is almost certainly not from a cartoon as there is no other trace of spolveri in the landscape. Finally, there is abundant hatching and cross‐hatching to indicate volume and shadows in the flesh and drapery of the figure (fig. 4). Despite now being visible to the naked eye due to increased transparency of paint as it ages, this hatching barely registers in the infrared reflectogram, so may have been executed in iron gall ink (most likely reinforced with a small amount of black as it is nevertheless faintly legible in infrared).⁴

Revisions

Although the painting is very close to the cartoon, a number of revisions can be observed. In the painting, the saint’s eyes have been adjusted so that she is looking further up in the direction of the apparition. In addition, her face is less in profile, with more of her far (right) eye and cheek now visible (in the cartoon the tip of her nose coincides with the contour of her cheek). The cartoon may have been rotated slightly in the course of transferring the design to the panel. The X‐radiograph shows that the shape of the head as reserved was originally more like the cartoon, as brushstrokes of sky paint extend as far as her right eye and under the hair at the back of her head.

In the cartoon, there is a knot of drapery over the saint’s right shoulder. This knot is still present in the underdrawing (fig. 2), though in reduced form, but was never painted.

In the drapery to the left of Saint Catherine’s left hand there are a number of changes between the underdrawing and the painting. The infrared reflectogram shows that the spiralling folds in the yellow lining of her cloak originally followed the cartoon, the outlines of which are roughly horizontal. The folds were then redrawn freehand on the panel falling in a diagonal direction to the left as painted, and extra folds were sketchily added in the blue dress where this is pushed up, which were also followed when it came to painting. The lines of these adjustments appear broader and darker than those relating to the cartoon perhaps because they are in a different material or because they are closer to the surface in the layer structure.

The flora and fauna were painted with no underdrawing. Trees (and their reflections) (fig. 5) were rapidly and confidently painted freehand over the underdrawing and paint of the buildings in the left background and the outlines of the hills to the right. A tower drawn on the descending hillside at the left was replaced by a bush.

Materials and technique⁵

When the picture was examined before the cleaning and restoration of 1967 (see ‘Conservation’ below) only a small number of samples were taken to establish the presence and nature of retouchings and overpaint, not for the purpose of identifying pigments or investigating the layer structure.⁶ Thus, the comments here regarding pigments derive from the analysis of paint samples taken in 2001, extended by further observations from surface examination with a stereomicroscope at magnifications up to 40x.

Analysis of the paint binder suggests that the medium is drying oil, which in the pale yellow paint of the sunlit sky at the top left has been identified using GC‐MS analysis as walnut oil and, in the red glaze on Saint Catherine’s cloak and the brownish‐green shadows of the rock on the lower left, heat‐bodied linseed oil with some pine resin. Pine resin was also found in the red lake glaze of Saint John the Baptist’s red drapery in the Ansidei Madonna (NG 1171), perhaps increasing the transparency and gloss.

Colourless powdered glass (manganese‐containing soda‐lime type) was used as an additive not only in the priming but also in Saint Catherine’s red drapery and the yellow‐brown paint of the wheel.⁷ It may have functioned as a drier and perhaps also modified the paint‐handling properties.

The position of the composition was planned with very fine incised lines ruled with a metal point (perhaps composed of a material that would make a mark such as a lead‐tin alloy, since they show through the paint as dark lines), bisecting the composition vertically and horizontally. Intersecting arcs on the horizontal show how the perpendicular was constructed using dividers. Similar ruled lines are found in three of the other smaller paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery, London (The Dream of a Knight [NG 213], The Procession to Calvary [NG 2919] and Saint John the Baptist preaching [NG6480]), and also in the Small Cowper Madonna in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (about 1505); they may have helped with the registration of the cartoon.

The bluest areas of the sky consist of natural ultramarine (lapis lazuli) mixed with lead white. The more greenish‐blue areas of the clouds contain some azurite in addition. The ultramarine‐containing paint of Saint Catherine’s dress has deteriorated in the deepest shadows where there was less lead white. The soft lavender hue derives from the addition of a little red lake to the ultramarine and white; the red lake may have faded to some extent so that the dress once had a richer colour.

Saint Catherine’s red cloak is underpainted in mixtures of red lake with varying quantities of lead white to create shadow or highlights. No vermilion was used in the underlayers, and in the lighter areas a little azurite was added to the pink mixture, both of which probably contribute to the distinctive hue of this drapery, which has shifted slightly towards a purple‐red in the highlights especially. In the darker areas there is only a little lead white together with the red lake, and in the deepest band of shadow along the outer edge of the saint’s left arm the modelling has been reinforced with further hatched strokes of deep red lake paint. A final glaze has been applied across the whole drapery and blotted with a cloth to create a thin even translucent layer. HPLC analysis revealed that two types of red lake were used. The lower layers contain mainly madder lake (as can be seen from the characteristic fluorescence in UV light under the microscope), while the more expensive kermes lake is mainly in the upper layers, including in the final glaze.

Microscopic examination of Saint Catherine’s green right sleeve suggests that it was painted with a layer of verdigris as a base colour, onto which mixtures of verdigris and lead‐tin yellow were applied to create the light and shade of the folds. It was finished with a thin translucent application of verdigris across the whole area, which allows the modelling beneath to still show through but achieves a final rich deep glazy effect.

The greenish‐browns of the landscape consist of lead white, azurite and lead‐tin yellow with some yellow, orange and brown iron earth pigments and also a little black. In the dark brown foliage of the small tree at the left edge, no discoloured verdigris glazes are present, and the paint is composed of red and brown earth pigments, azurite and a little yellow earth and lead‐tin yellow. The yellow‐brown of the saint’s wheel is richer in yellow pigments; lead white is mixed with lead‐tin yellow and a yellow earth of intense colour, together with an orange‐coloured earth, lead white, umber (manganese detected by EDX), vermilion, black and a little azurite. The studs were painted using azurite and white.

The border of Saint Catherine’s neckline was not black as it now appears but probably a deep purple, perhaps intended for velvet, as it contains blue and red pigments as well as black.

For the flesh, Raphael used semi‐transparent paint containing varying proportions of yellow, brown, and red earth pigments and red lake combined with lead white, which was very thinly applied except in the strongest highlights, such as the white of the eye or the tip of the nose (fig. 6). The hatching in the underdrawing is therefore very visible in the shadows of the flesh (fig. 4). The thin application and relatively low proportion of lead white, except in the highlights, explains the contrast between areas of flesh and the sky in the X‐radiograph.

Incised lines marked out the rays of the sunburst and the ellipse of the saint’s halo, which were then painted with shell gold. Shell gold was also used to highlight threads in her veil, which sparkle in the heavenly light, and is present also in her belt, around the cuff of her right sleeve and along the neckline of her purplish dress. (Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle suggested that traces of gold ornament in the neckline may once have formed letters, possibly a signature, but these prove to be merely decorative swirls.)⁸

Condition and conservation⁹

The panel is generally in good condition, although it has a slight convex warp as seen from the front (more on the right than on the left), and has been affected by woodworm damage, especially towards the right side (as seen from behind). There is a long split extending up from the lower edge to the saint’s right elbow and a short split running down from the top edge into the clouds, both now repaired. Several smaller cracks and checks in the wood are visible at the upper and lower edges and some in the back of the panel. The bottom edge is somewhat broken up where it was cut. The paint layers are in very good condition, with the exception of the ultramarine‐containing shadows of the saint’s lavender dress, which now appear blanched (although ultramarine is also present in the sky, it is coarser and is mixed with lead white so that the paint is better preserved). The red lake component of the dress may also have faded to some extent, while the glazes on the green sleeve and sash are now slightly discoloured.

Everywhere that lead‐tin yellow is used, for example in the green sleeve or the hair, it is unusually badly affected by lead soaps, which are larger and more numerous than usual.¹⁰

Johann David Passavant noted in his monograph of 1839 that the picture was in general perfectly conserved, except for a few retouchings in the forehead and the roots of the hair, and in 1847 Charles Eastlake too declared it to be ‘in excellent preservation’.¹¹ The latter remarked in his notes in the Manuscript Catalogue in 1855 that it had not been varnished since it entered the Gallery in 1839, but he presumed that a mastic varnish must have been applied prior to then.¹² It is uncertain what Crowe and Cavalcaselle were referring to when they wrote in 1882 that ‘the surface is injured by a most unfortunate cleaning’; they were perhaps responding to the blanching of the ultramarine.¹³ Flaking paint was secured by Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973) in April 1940, the surface was polished by William Vallance (1883–1951) in May 1945, and old and new blisters were laid by Arthur Lucas (1916–1996) in January 1947. The picture was cleaned and restored for the first and only time since it was acquired by Ruhemann in 1967, and was revarnished by Jill Dunkerton in 1991, at which time the heavy wooden battens were removed from the reverse and replaced with balsa wood inserts by Dave Thomas.

There is some retouching along the splits and in an area of damage at the lower left edge. Losses in the rock on the left, the upper right corner of the sky, Saint Catherine’s wheel and the yellow lining to her cloak were also retouched. Very small retouched losses and woodworm exit holes are scattered across the figure (and show as black in the infrared reflectogram).

Subject and description

Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth‐century princess, was converted to Christianity by a desert hermit and in a vision underwent a mystic marriage with Christ. When she would not renounce her faith, the Emperor Maxentius devised an instrument of torture consisting of four spiked wheels to which she was bound, but a thunderbolt destroyed it before it could harm her. Catherine was then beheaded. Divorced from the narrative circumstances of her martyrdom, the saint is here depicted in a peaceful rural landscape. Reflected in the stretch of water behind her are the trees and buildings on the far shore. Without her usual attributes of a palm or sword, only the large wheel alludes to her gruesome ordeals (although this is studded rather than spiked). Instead, Raphael focused on the visionary aspect of the saint’s faith, capturing her – with parted lips and hand on heart – gazing up at an illumination in the sky in a moment of divine ecstasy.

In the bottom left corner is a dandelion, a bitter herb that appears in Netherlandish and German paintings of the Crucifixion, and was symbolic of Christian grief, and in particular Christ’s Passion (fig. 7). The dandelion clock also features in Raphael’s slightly earlier Holy Family with a Palm Tree (about 1506–7; National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh), and the almost exactly contemporary Baglioni Entombment (fig. 8), where it is juxtaposed with Raphael’s signature inscribed on a rock (it has sometimes been considered a form of signature).¹⁴ Raphael, who was not as instinctively interested in flora as Pietro Perugino (about 1450–1523) or even his father Giovanni Santi (active 1469–94), may have remembered the motif from an altarpiece by Bartolomeo Caporali (active 1467–91) representing the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the convent church of S. Maria di Monteluce in Perugia (1477–9; now Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria), which contains among other flowers a beautifully observed dandelion plant, with one whole clock, one three‐quarters blown and three flowers in bud (fig. 9).¹⁵ Raphael and Berto di Giovanni (active 1497; d. 1529) were commissioned to paint the Coronation of the Virgin for the high altar of the same church in 1505 (eventually completed by Giulio Romano (1492?–1546) and Gianfrancesco Penni (1496–1528) in 1520–5 (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome).

Attribution and date

The attribution of Saint Catherine to Raphael has never been doubted. The painting is generally dated close to the Baglioni Entombment (fig. 8), signed and dated 1507, with which it shares poses, colours, forms, landscape and the unblown dandelion clock, while the figure of the saint herself is similar to the allegorical figures of Faith and Hope in its grisaille predella.¹⁶ The painting also has much in common with the Bridgewater Madonna, which is usually dated to 1507 on account of its Leonardesque preparatory drawings, sketched alongside ideas for other compositions of this period. Only Adolf Rosenberg and Georg Gronau have dated Saint Catherine earlier to 1505.¹⁷ Some authors point to similarities with the Belle Jardinière, dated 1508, and this also seems valid, particularly in the features of the women’s heads and the Michelangelesque contrapposto pose of the Christ Child, the latter bearing comparison with the saint’s own pose and with that of a similarly nonchalant putto on a sheet of preparatory studies for Saint Catherine (fig. 22; see the second sheet of studies under ‘Drawings’ below). Raphael was paid for work begun in the Stanza della Segnatura, in the Vatican Palace, on 13 January 1509, implying that he must have arrived in Rome in the second half of 1508.¹⁸ While Oskar Fischel, Françoise Viatte and John Pope‐Hennessy put forward arguments for the painting being a ‘Roman epilogue’ to Raphael’s Florentine experiences, reflecting his new access to the antique, it seems implausible that the young artist would have had time for anything other than planning and executing the Disputa in the months after his arrival and before he had earned his first 100 ducats in January 1509.¹⁹ Saint Catherine still has an Umbrian air about it in the landscape and foreground plants, and in the way it combines all the formative influences of Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) in a unified harmonious concoction, and to this writer it seems reasonable to place it in the year or so before Raphael’s departure for Rome, loosely 1507 to the first half of 1508.

Style and influences

Raphael’s archetypal, expressive presentation of the saint in ecstasy developed out of conventions previously adopted principally for altarpieces. Perugino was a notable pioneer of religious sentiment in devotional works, and his figures – frequently with upturned heads and raised eyes – were praised by contemporaries for their ‘angelic air’. Raphael may well have been reapplying lessons learned from saints in paintings by Perugino such as the Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece in the National Gallery (NG 288.1–3), which, on account of the original polyptych format, are depicted independently like Saint Catherine, in landscapes in separate compartments. Perugino’s juxtaposition of the figures against distant landscapes, the still‐life details of flowers, and in particular young Tobias’s upturned head, open‐mouthed expression and contrapposto pose (fig. 10), are all highly comparable to equivalent features in the Saint Catherine.

Perugino’s influence is also evident in Raphael’s painting technique, particularly in the drawing of the drapery – with ‘pothook’ folds – over the saint’s left arm (even more apparent in the cartoon), the rich saturated colours, and the hatched modelling in the shadows. The translucent, pearly quality of the flesh painting was also learned from Perugino, who in turn developed this technique from his observation of early Netherlandish panel paintings in oil, especially portraits by Hans Memling (active 1465; d. 1494). Here, as in the Mond Crucifixion (NG 3943), in an old‐fashioned formula that would not be continued in Rome, the saint’s eyelashes are depicted as points emerging from the centre of the eyelid (fig. 6). Her pose, however, is far more dynamic than anything in Perugino’s oeuvre, attesting in form and spirit the double influences of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The saint’s beautiful curving contrapposto is partly derived from Leonardo’s standing Leda, which Raphael had copied not long before (fig. 11), and the spiralling arrangement of her hair and the yellow lining of her mantle are also characteristic of Leonardo’s manner. The burgeoning sense of sculptural form and the foreshortening of the raised head almost certainly derive from Raphael’s familiarity with Michelangelo’s marble Saint Matthew (1504–8) for the interior of Florence Cathedral. In Raphael’s drawing after the statue, made in connection with the bearers in the Baglioni Entombment of almost exactly the same moment (fig. 12), he characteristically clarified the outlines and forms of Michelangelo’s promethean unfinished sculpture. Indeed, Saint Catherine’s pose is infused with all the clarity and grace of a classical statue (the figure has been likened to a Venus pudica and to a classical muse).²⁰

Raphael went on to reuse the dynamic formula of his Saint Catherine, ignited by her faith in the divine, after he arrived in Rome. A drawing for the figure of Poetry in the vault of the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–9) is particularly close in pose – more so than the finished fresco (fig. 13).²¹ Authors from Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr (1757–1822) onwards have also pointed out parallels with the spiralling pose of the figure of Galatea in the Farnesina fresco of 1512.²² Catherine’s gesture with her hand on her heart, expressive of inner passion, is found in some of Raphael’s later female portraits (La Velata, 1512–13, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti Florence and, though perhaps in part or wholly by a close follower, La Fornarina, 1518–19, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome).

Reputation

Raphael’s Saint Catherine stands at the fountainhead of a tradition of expressive devotional works that reached its apogee in Rome in the early seventeenth century, particularly in the work of Guido Reni (1575–1642), an ardent admirer of Raphael’s art. The upward gaze – and sometimes also the hand on heart – that Reni reiterated in countless paintings of Christ, the Virgin and a panoply of different saints, became a signature feature of his work and enormously influential. Much earlier, in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the picture may have been in Pietro Aretino’s collection in Venice (see under ‘Previous owners’ below), it is tempting to imagine Titian (active about 1506; d. 1576) turning to Raphael’s example as inspiration for his variations on the subject of the Penitent Magdalene, first devised for Vittoria Colonna (1490/2–1547) in the early 1530s, developing the theme of pure, heartfelt reverence to an intense and impassioned degree.²³ The Allegory of Wisdom and Strength by Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) of about 1565 closely reflects the pose of Saint Catherine, but at full length and in reverse (fig. 14). A full‐length sculpture of Saint Catherine by Alessandro Vittoria (1525–1608) in the church of S. Giuliano in Venice dated 1583–4 may be another Venetian echo of the painting.²⁴ In the nineteenth century, painters of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle visited the National Gallery and admired the newly acquired Saint Catherine. The young William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) noticed the detailed depiction of the dandelion clock and included a similar one next to his signature in the lower right corner of his painting Rienzi (1849; Ramsbury Manor Foundation), perhaps as a discreet homage.²⁵ And the artist and writer John Ruskin (1819–1900) mentioned the flower in his description of Raphael’s painting in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843).²⁶ In 1840, shortly after he arrived in London to teach art, the Scottish artist William Dyce (1806–1864) painted his own response to Raphael’s Saint Catherine, depicting her as an ingenuous young girl in a vibrant crimson dress, swathed in coiling drapery, arrested by her divine calling (fig. 15). In the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group painter Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) paid homage to Raphael’s masterpiece by making a copy (in around 1922) that she gave to her lifelong friend Duncan Grant (1885–1978), which still rests on the mantelpiece in his bedroom at their house Charleston, near Firle in Sussex (fig. 16).²⁷

Preparatory drawings

Two sheets of preparatory drawings and a scale cartoon for Saint Catherine survive. The earliest in the sequence is a rapid, preliminary full‐length study in pen and brown ink of the saint standing (fig. 17).²⁸ She is shown with her head turned in the opposite direction to the painting and resting her left arm on the wheel, only summarily indicated. Raphael had previously included the figure of Saint Catherine standing in two paintings, a tiny panel of about 1500–3 (fig. 18), in which she stands on her wheel, and in the Sacra Conversazione or Virgin and Child with Saints known as the Colonna Altarpiece of about 1504–5 (fig. 19). Although Raphael studied the fall of the drapery over her feet, he already seems to have been more interested in the upper part of her body, emphasising some of these contours with several reinforcing strokes. The problem of including such a huge wheel may have decided him against the full‐length composition. The upper body is conceived as a sequence of spherical forms, rising up from the belly, through the almost circular thorax, to the head and topknot. An anonymous copy of a further development of this drawing, showing Saint Catherine full length and clothed, but now in the pose of the finalised cartoon, is in the Devonshire Collection (fig. 20).²⁹ On the verso of the Oxford drawing are black‐chalk studies that are likely to be for the mourning women in the Baglioni Entombment (fig. 21).³⁰ The circling quest for forms and comparable topknots in these studies demonstrates that Raphael was working on the two stylistically very similar paintings almost simultaneously.

The composition is developed further in a double‐sided sheet of studies in pen and brown ink over black chalk (over stylus indentation and metalpoint on the verso) also in the Ashmolean Museum.³¹ In the sketches on the verso (fig. 22) Raphael began to experiment with a three‐quarter‐length figure. The study on the right is from a nude (apparently male) model kneeling in a graceful contrapposto pose (an antique Venus pudica model or one of Leonardo’s studies for the kneeling Leda may have been in Raphael’s mind at this moment). The sketch at the bottom of the sheet, at 90 degrees, is a three‐quarter‐length nude study of a similar figure in reverse, this time with breasts suggested, and very close in pose to the saint in the finished painting, but with the head tilted to the side rather than upwards. A third study in the middle of the sheet to the left, drawn very rapidly in the manner of Leonardo, explores the figure clothed and leaning on a more clearly delineated wheel. Except for the position of the head and right arm – here indicated in a flurry of alternatives – this solution is much closer than all the previous sketches to the finished painting. Two rapid horizontal strokes at knee height, corresponding approximately to the bottom edge of the finished picture, indicate that Raphael was now starting to commit to a three‐quarter‐length composition. In this study the saint holds a palm symbolising her martyrdom in her left hand, a motif Raphael had previously used for the figure of Saint Catherine in the Colonna Altarpiece, but dropped as this composition developed. The final sketch in the top left corner, almost certainly made from life and again reminiscent of Leonardo, is a close‐up study for the figure’s neck and shoulder muscles, with particular emphasis on the play of light and shade, described by means of hatching and cross‐hatching in pen and ink. The torsion of the saint’s muscular neck and shoulders as she raises her head to the heavenly light is an important feature of the finished painting.

The head of Saint Catherine on the recto (fig. 23) is more highly finished than the exploratory studies on the verso and may represent the very last modification Raphael made to his design. It records an alternative for the one aspect of the cartoon that Raphael did not transfer exactly to the finished work, namely the orientation of the head and the position of the facial features within it. The drawing may therefore have been made after the cartoon stage, at the moment when Raphael decided to include more of the far cheek and right eye, so that he had something to refer to when making freehand adjustments to the head in the underdrawing on the panel. (Conceivably, it could have been an earlier solution to which he returned.)

Raphael’s full‐scale working cartoon for Saint Catherine is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (fig. 3; see ‘Underdrawing’ above for its correlation with the underdrawing). In contrast to his precise, linear cartoons in pen and ink for small‐scale works between 1500 and 1504, the Louvre cartoon and others of this slightly later period demonstrate a rougher, more experimental type of drawing, with far greater emphasis on tonal modelling. This new approach was clearly the result of Raphael’s study of techniques developed by Leonardo, who embellished his cartoons with extraordinary chiaroscuro and sfumato effects. Raphael used a broad‐ended chalk to reinforce the contours in certain areas (the wheel, some of the drapery, Catherine’s neck), and he went over some of the outlines several times. He laid in the shadows with fairly rough hatching and cross‐hatching, not always in the same orientation, softening the transitions by rubbing the chalk with his fingers, and using white chalk, similarly rubbed, for some of the more prominent highlights. The cartoon would have been kept as a guide to the lighting of the figure once the contours had been transferred, and indeed hatching in the shadows of the saint’s sleeves and down the left side of her body in the underdrawing was clearly copied freehand and not traced.

Previous owners

Pietro Aretino?

It is not known who commissioned Saint Catherine and its presumed date – extremely close to the Baglioni Entombment – could imply a Perugian or a Florentine patron. It may have been intended as an object for private prayer, perhaps for a patron devoted to the saint or even named after her (an earlier precedent for this type of image in Raphael’s oeuvre is the Saint Sebastian of about 1502–3, in the Pinacoteca dell’Accademia Carrara, Bergamo).³² The aptness of the name saint must have been in the mind of Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) when he thought of presenting a picture in his possession ‘in which is the image of the figure of Saint Catherine, [by the more than divine] painter Raphael of Urbino’ to Catherine de’ Medici (1515–1589), Queen of France, in 1550. In the event, he changed his mind and gave it to Agosto d’Adda (active 1536; d. 1550), a Milanese banker to whom he owed favours.³³ It is impossible to tell whether the painting owned by Aretino, who records it in his possession in Venice in 1550, is identical with this Saint Catherine.³⁴ If so, he could have acquired it in Rome some time before he left the city in 1524–5, eventually settling in Venice in 1527 (see the Venetian echoes of the work discussed under ‘Reputation’ above).³⁵

The Crescenzi Family

A red seal on the reverse of the panel with the arms of the Crescenzi family flanked by tassels (fig. 1) indicates that a cardinal of the Crescenzi family once owned the picture.³⁶ This must have been before it is first recorded in Scipione Borghese’s collection (for whom see below) in the 1620s or early 1630s, from which time the provenance is fully established. The Crescenzi were one of the oldest and most illustrious of Rome’s patrician families and produced four cardinals over the centuries, but only the dates of the first two coincide with the period in question: Marcello (1500–1552), who became cardinal in 1542, and Pier Paolo (1572–1645), who was elevated to this rank in 1611. According to the current state of knowledge it is not possible to say with certainty which cardinal owned the picture. Little is known about Marcello, a doctor in canon and civil law, apart from his ecclesiastical appointments under Pope Clement VII (1478–1534) and Pope Paul III (1468–1549).³⁷ His nomination as cardinal elicited the disapproval of the Sacred College on account of his dubious morals. He was absent from his constituencies, had an illegitimate daughter and his Roman villa, developed from a small pavilion on a vineyard he owned on the Pincian Hill (the Casina Crescenzi, subsequently developed by later owners including the Medici after whom the villa is named), was known for being a centre of mundanity and luxury. Apart from this building project and his use of the Casina Bessarione on the Via Appia Antica, where his arms are found in the fresco decorations of the loggia, he was not known for his interest in the arts or collecting.

By far the more plausible candidate as the former owner of Saint Catherine is Pier Paolo Crescenzi, the second son of Costanza del Drago (d. 1613) and the Roman patrician Virgilio Crescenzi (1530?–1592), an enlightened patron of the arts and dedicated to reform within the Church, principally through his close ties of friendship with Filippo Neri (1515–1595), founder of the Oratorian order.³⁸ Around 1580, Virgilio employed Giacomo della Porta (1540–1602) to build a dignified palace known as the Palazzo Crescenzi alla Rotonda near the Pantheon, on the site of smaller properties owned by the family. He later employed Cristoforo Roncalli, called Pomarancio (1552–1626), as a tutor for his sons, one of whom became an amateur and another a professional artist.³⁹ Roncalli ran an informal academy and taught life classes from the Palazzo Crescenzi, and was also responsible for decorations in the palace, which was referred to as ‘una scuola di Virtù’ by the artist and art historian Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643).⁴⁰ Virgilio was also involved, as an executor of the Contarelli family, with commissioning Giuseppe Cesari (called Cavaliere d’Arpino; 1568–1640) and later Caravaggio (1571–1610) to decorate the Contarelli Chapel in S. Luigi de’ Francesi.

Pier Paolo, who grew up in this enlightened and devout environment, was educated at the Collegio Romano and then at the University of Perugia, where he earned a doctorate in both canon and civil law.⁴¹ He was as devoted to Neri as his father had been and was twice a witness during the process for the Oratorian’s canonisation in 1609. As well as his many and varied ecclesiastical appointments at the court of the Borghese Pope Paul V (1550–1621), he participated in the conclaves to elect first Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623) and then Pope Urban VIII (1568–1844) (both times himself being considered a possible candidate), and held many senior positions until his death.⁴² In addition to his ecclesiastical responsibilities, which he carried out assiduously, Pier Paolo was a passionate and expert collector of sacred and profane antiquities and Roman epitaphs. After their father’s death in 1592, Pier Paolo and his brother Giacomo (about 1570–1638) continued to develop the building of the Palazzo Crescenzi and embellish its interiors. Their collection of antiquities was arranged in the palace almost in the manner of a museum. Pier Paolo was an early patron of the French painter Claude Lorrain (1704/5?–1682), whom he commissioned to paint frescoes in the Palazzo Crescenzi in the late 1620s.⁴³ There were other artworks in the family collection including the rare Portrait of Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543), today in the Frick Collection in New York, which Sir Arthur Hopton, diplomat at the Spanish court, informed the Earl of Arundel in a letter of 1631 was not to be had ‘at any price’.⁴⁴

Cardinal Crescenzi was a contemporary of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (for whom see below) and attended many conclaves and key consistories in his company, although he did not always endorse the candidates proposed by the latter. Since he is known to have sold some of his most precious antiquities in the 1520s,⁴⁵ it is not implausible – particularly if pressurised by the Borghese pope as we know other cardinals were – that he might have sold an important painting by Raphael in his possession to his colleague Scipione who was, as will be noted, on the hunt for prestigious works by the artist. The Crescenzi arms stamped in the seal on the picture’s reverse have the tassels of his cardinal status, indicating that the painting may only have been in Pier Paolo’s possession for a short time, between the date he assumed the red hat in 1511 and its registration in Cardinal Scipione’s inventory (probably datable 1621–33), although of course the seal could have been applied to a picture he had acquired earlier. At some point, the Crescenzi also sold to Scipione a vineyard they owned at the Porta Pinciana, which he incorporated into the gardens and land surrounding his villa.⁴⁶

Scipione Borghese

Scipione Borghese (1577–1633) was appointed cardinal by his maternal uncle Pope Paul V immediately after the latter’s ascent to the papal throne in 1605. As the Pope’s nephew, Scipione wielded great power as secretary and effective head of the Vatican government, amassing an enormous fortune, land and properties through papal fees and taxes. An avid collector of modern and ancient art, he used his wealth and power to form an outstanding collection of paintings and sculpture, at the core of which were works by Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio, as well as the sculptures he commissioned from Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) between 1618 and 1632, many still the cornerstones of the collection of the Galleria Borghese housed in the opulent villa he built between 1613 and his death in 1633. His art collection was founded in 1607, when, wielding the authority of his new position, he arranged for 130 paintings that he coveted – including early works by Caravaggio – to be confiscated from the painter Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino, himself a discerning collector.⁴⁷ The following year he bought 71 pictures en bloc from Cardinal Sfondrato (1560–1618), which included two paintings by Raphael, the Portrait of Pope Julius II (1511; NG 27) and the Madonna del Velo (1511–12; Musée Condé, Chantilly). In the same year he set his sights on Raphael’s Entombment, the consummate altarpiece that had been commissioned by Atalanta Baglioni (d. 1509) for her chapel in S. Francesco al Prato in Perugia a century before, arranging in March 1608 for it to be removed from the church at dead of night, hoisted over the city walls and transported to Rome.⁴⁸ The theft caused uproar in the city but Scipione quashed all protest using the Pope’s sanction, promising merely to replace the painting with a copy, which was delivered a year later on 17 March 1609.⁴⁹ These are examples of the lengths to which the cardinal would go to acquire prizes suited to his refined tastes and ambition to garner prestige and wealth for himself and his heirs.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria is first documented in an inventory of Scipione’s collection, probably drawn up between Pope Paul V’s death in 1621 and the cardinal’s own in 1633, but most likely very shortly before the latter event in 1632.⁵⁰ With the end of the Borghese pontificate, Scipione moved from his palace in the Borgo Nuovo near the Vatican, and installed himself and his household of more than two hundred staff in the newly built Ripetta wing of the Palazzo Borghese in the Campo Marzio.⁵¹ At this point, his painting collection (with a few drawings) was still relatively modest, numbering 294 items, mainly displayed in suites of rooms on the ground floor of the palace – only a few portraits adorned Scipione’s villa on the Pincio. This gallery arrangement in the Palazzo Borghese became more settled after 1625 when Scipione transferred almost two hundred loads of statuary to the villa, already adorned with newly commissioned sculptures by Bernini. Saint Catherine was one of eight ‘sopraporte’ (overdoors) that hung in the ‘Galleria dell’Appartamento di Mezzo’ on the piano nobile of the palace, presumably one of the smaller rooms near Scipione’s studio, a large vaulted chamber giving onto a loggia overlooking the hanging garden.⁵² Four other pictures then attributed to Raphael were displayed on the walls in the same room, namely the Dream of a Knight (NG 213) and the Three Graces (about 1504; Musée Condé, Chantilly), along with two other small works.⁵³ In the adjacent room there was also a tondo probably identifiable as the copy after the Alba Madonna still in the Borghese collection today, which like Saint Catherine was displayed as a ‘sopraporta’.⁵⁴ Raphael’s Entombment is not mentioned in this inventory, and it may already have been transported to the Pincio, as Scipione’s greatest prize, where the villa’s curator Giacomo Manilli later recorded it displayed along with the sculpture collections on the ground floor.⁵⁵

Prince Marcantonio II and Giovanni Battista

Scipione’s heir was his nephew Prince Marcantonio II (1601–1658). He and his wife, Camilla Orsini (1603–1685), were the principal residents of the palace both in Scipione’s lifetime and after his death. During their tenure, the smaller Raphaels were for a time moved to the Pincian villa and were displayed in a ‘camerino’ of the ‘appartamento a mezzogiorno’, corresponding to Galleries XII or XIII on the upper floor of the villa today.⁵⁶ This was the second of three cabinets adorned with precious ornament and small works of the highest quality to which the prince could retire to enjoy his treasures. Saint Catherine was displayed here, again as an overdoor.⁵⁷ During the second half of the seventeenth century the paintings were progressively moved back to the palace in the Campo Marzio, leaving the villa mainly dedicated to the display of sculpture.⁵⁸

In 1638 Prince Marcantonio arranged the prestigious marriage of his heir, Paolo Borghese (1622–1646), to Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, Princess of Meldola, Sarsina and Rossano (1623–1681), when both were teenagers, but Paolo died prematurely eight years later, predeceasing his father. The title therefore passed on the prince’s death to his 19‐year‐old grandson Giovanni Battista (1639–1717), who remained head of the family for almost sixty years. It was he who transformed the palace completely, employing Carlo Rainaldi (1611–1691), who between 1671 and 1676 opened up a thrilling vista to the Tiber through a newly decorated ground‐floor suite of ten rooms, designed as summer apartments for the prince and his consort Eleonora Boncompagni (1642–95).⁵⁹ This ingeniously remodelled wing housed a huge gallery of about 700 pictures, combining the Borghese collection inherited by Prince Giovanni Battista from his father with pictures from the Aldobrandini family collection (including the Garvagh Madonna, NG 744), which also passed to him following the death of his mother Olimpia Aldobrandini (1623–1681).

The Borghese quadreria was open to visitors and remained one of the city’s most popular destinations for travellers to the city for over two centuries. Hence, we know that Saint Catherine was among 58 paintings hung against red damask in the third room, one of the access rooms to the new apartments, as recorded by the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654–1728) who visited the palace in 1687–8.⁶⁰ The most complete record of the collection is provided by the 1693 inventory of the palazzo in the Campo Marzio, at which point the pictures were given numbers frequently legible on the works to this day.⁶¹ Subjects and dimensions were fairly detailed but attributions were not reliable: a total of 44 pictures were optimistically given to Raphael.⁶² The inventory number 136 in white paint in the bottom right corner of the Saint Catherine corresponds to this inventory where it is described as: ‘un quadro di tre palmi in circa in tavola con Santa Caterina della Rota cornice dorata intagliata del n.o 136 di Raffaele d’Urbino’ (‘a picture of about three palms high of Saint Catherine with the Wheel in a carved and gilded frame, numbered 136, by Raphael of Urbino’).⁶³ It was hung in a corner beneath a Holy Family then given to Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) (1605–10, Galleria Borghese), which was skied ‘sotto al Cornicione’ (‘beneath the cornice’); below Saint Catherine were The Betrayal of Christ on copper by Cavaliere d’Arpino (1596–7; Galleria Borghese) and a Holy Family by Dosso Dossi (about 1486–1542) (date and whereabouts unknown).⁶⁴ Giovanni Pietro Rossini saw the Saint Catherine in this location in 1693, referring to it as a ‘cosa singolare’ (‘a unique thing’) in his famous Mercurio Errante.⁶⁵

Marcantonio IV Borghese

Very little changed in the palace display for most of the eighteenth century until 1767–75, when the apartments were refurbished on the occasion of the marriage of Giovanni Battista’s great‐grandson Marcantonio IV Borghese (1730–1800) to Anna Maria Salviati (1752–1809). From this time forward the majority of the important pictures by Raphael, including the Entombment, were displayed in the fourth room of the enfilade, which was the antechamber to the throne room.⁶⁶ It was at this time that the Scottish engraver Richard Cooper (1740–1814) made a careful copy drawing after Saint Catherine along with a number of other pictures in the Borghese collection (fig. 24; see under ‘Copies’ below). One of the many visitors to the gallery was Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803), the German author influential in the Sturm und Drang movement, whose passionate appreciation of art was deepened by a three‐year trip to Italy (1780–3). His rapturous notes on Saint Catherine exemplify the attraction the German Romantic movement was to find in Raphael’s art in the nineteenth century: A face compared to which the heads of all other saints fade away. Deep melancholy, and a sublime beautiful soul; an indescribable expression in the vivid look of the eyes toward the sky, and the most charming innocence and serenity of spirit also in the lips. Her right [hand] touching her heart. A landscape with a quiet spring in the background. Such figures are rare in this world even among the most excellent women; but they do exist. A sweet consolation while suffering.⁶⁷

The comments of Heinse’s compatriot, Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, were more rooted in art history. Comparing Saint Catherine to Raphael’s Entombment, among several pictures by the artist now gathered together in the same room, he astutely noted that it was in: ‘[t]he same style, and even [has] the same flowers on the ground. The head full of expression has a lot of his Galathea in the small Farnese Palace, the so‐called Farnesina.’⁶⁸

Following General Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) occupation of Italy in 1796–7, art treasures were removed by French commissioners from churches, monasteries and public galleries throughout the peninsula.⁶⁹ In addition, Napoleon levied heavy taxes from the Italian nobility who were obliged to sell valuable artworks to fund these payments. Sales were extensive as anxious aristocrats sought to prove they no longer had the means to pay the large and relentless contributions demanded of them by the French, also fearing that if they did not sell their collections they would lose them anyway. Officials of the French occupation, bankers and other individuals residing in Rome were the first to profit from this situation, reselling works of art to agents from France and England, or keeping them hidden until a more favourable climate emerged in which to dispose of them.

Alexander Day and Pietro Camuccini

It was during this time of political uncertainty that the English artist and picture dealer Alexander Day (1773–1841), resident in Rome between 1774 and 1815, formed a partnership with the Roman restorer Pietro Camuccini (1760–1833) and began trading in the large number of premium artworks that were suddenly becoming available.⁷⁰ Day’s contacts with potential British buyers combined with Camuccini’s familiarity with Roman aristocrats and expertise in restoration meant that they were able to resell pictures on the international market at a significant profit. Their collaboration began in 1794 and lasted until 1801, but their most important acquisitions took place during the short‐lived first Cisalpine Republic (1797–9), when they purchased numerous masterpieces, mostly from the prestigious Aldobrandini, Borghese and Colonna collections, as well as several churches in Rome and the surrounding areas. Raphael paintings with impeccable provenances were as ever at the top of most collectors’ wish lists and were secure investments for dealers when reselling on the international art market. It was in this period that the partners acquired the Saint Catherine, along with the Garvagh Madonna (NG 744), the latter – being part of the Aldobrandini inheritance – bought from Marcantonio’s younger brother Giovanni Battista Borghese Aldobrandini (d. 1802), who had inherited the Aldobrandini title and possessions when their brother Prince Paolo Maria Aldobrandini died childless in 1892. In order to secure as many high‐quality works of art while these were available, Camuccini and Day acted in partnership with other speculators and collectors, most notably the famous Franco‐Italian banker to the Vatican Giovanni Torlonia (1755–1829).⁷¹ In the case of both the Saint Catherine and the Garvagh Madonna Torlonia held a 50 per cent stake.⁷²

With the re‐establishment of the pontifical government in 1800, and the widening gap between prices fetched by old masters in Rome and London, Camuccini and Day selected at least 36 pictures of the highest quality, including the two works by Raphael, which they arranged to smuggle secretly out of Italy.⁷³ This was a daring and hazardous enterprise on a number of levels. The paintings were overpainted with fake pictures to conceal their true identity and value.⁷⁴ Camuccini then accompanied them to London on a circuitous sea route via Hamburg, which required the consignments to be loaded and unloaded from different ships six times.⁷⁵ The voyage was difficult, and the sea clearly rough, since two cases containing the Saint Catherine and a painting attributed to Garofalo (about 1481–1559) were found, when opened, to have been flooded with sea water, as attested by the strained letters from Camuccini on arrival in London to his mother and brother Vincenzo in Rome.⁷⁶ Camuccini delivered the pictures by October 1800, after which they were cleaned of all overpaint, restored and reframed. From February to May 1801 they were exhibited for sale by private contract in the rooms of the painter and art dealer Henry Tresham (about 1750–1814), a long‐time friend of Day, at 20 Lower Brook Street.⁷⁷ Although large numbers of visitors attended the exhibition, sales were slow because of the difficulty in finding clients with enough capital to purchase the pictures outright; a few remained unsold for more than a decade (for example, the Garvagh Madonna).

John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick

A prominent buyer of items in the sale was John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick (1769–1859), who invested in several pictures including the three most expensive masterpieces in the sale, the so‐called ‘Leonardo’ Christ among the Doctors (NG 18) (in fact by Bernardino Luini, [about 1480–1532]) estimated at £5,000, Annibale Carracci’s Christ appearing to Saint Peter on the Appian Way (NG 9) estimated at £3,500, and Saint Catherine estimated at £2,500, works he most likely knew before his departure from Rome in early 1800.⁷⁸ Before the pictures arrived in London the following year, Northwick had signed bonds for sizeable loans from Day and Camuccini, presumably to secure his interest in the pictures. The loans were meant to be repaid within three years, but Northwick was unable to honour the agreements in full and all three pictures with three others from the previous exhibition were reoffered for sale by Day at the gallery of William Buchanan (1777–1864) at 18 Oxenden Street, Haymarket (24 May 1808 and following days), even though some of them may already have been in Northwick’s hands.⁷⁹ The Saint Catherine and the ‘Leonardo’ were certainly in Northwick’s possession by 1816 when they were lent to the British Institution in his name (although still not fully paid off), but by now the Annibale had been acquired by the goldsmith and jeweller Thomas Hamlet (fl. 1793–1842; d. about 1849).⁸⁰ Lord Northwick’s long‐term bonds against the pictures, which had been extended for almost a quarter of a century, were finally repaid in March 1824, in the case of the Raphael two months after he had actually sold it.⁸¹ In September of the previous year, Urbino Pizzetta (d. 1825), a miniaturist and picture dealer, made copies of both pictures and a Holy Family (NG 169) by Ludovico Mazzolino (active 1504; d. 1528?) in Northwick’s possession, completed by 3 February 1824.⁸² At the same time, a high‐quality engraving of the Saint Catherine was produced by the eminent French engraver Auguste Desnoyers (1779–1857) (see under ‘Prints’ below). Northwick must have had these painted and engraved records made because he was already preparing to sell these pictures. The Raphael was bought either at the end of 1823 or in early January 1824 by the dealer John Smith (1781–1855) acting in partnership with Pizzetta.⁸³ The ‘Leonardo’, on the other hand, was acquired by the Rev. W. Holwell Carr.⁸⁴ Smith immediately sold Saint Catherine (which ironically had hardly appreciated in over a quarter of a century) on to William Beckford (1760–1844) for £2,615.5s. on 26 January 1824 (and two days later also sold him the Mazzolino for £270).⁸⁵ Smith’s note dated March 1824 on the back of a watercolour copy of Saint Catherine by Frederick Read (b. 1800) states that he had sold the Raphael to Beckford for 3,000 guineas, Pizzetta’s share in the profit perhaps accounting for the discrepancy between this figure and that in the stock book.⁸⁶

William Beckford

Saint Catherine hung in Beckford’s dining room on the ground floor in Lansdown Crescent, Bath, surrounded by nine smaller pictures, divided by windows commanding views of both the city of Bath and the Avon Valley.⁸⁷ The display, which included works by Garofalo, Mazzolino, Perugino, Girolamo da Carpi (1501–1556) and others, was designed to represent ‘the noblest productions of Italian art of the time of Raphael’.⁸⁸ Gustav Waagen, who thought this ‘perhaps one of the most beautiful [rooms] in the world’, was particularly smitten by the Saint Catherine, describing her attitude as ‘the purest expression of holy rapture’.⁸⁹ Beckford, who would escort visitors personally and unlock the inner frame with a key he kept in his pocket so that they could admire the picture unglazed, frequently eulogised in front of it: Oh gracious heaven – is she not beautiful? What a mouth! – look at the corners of that mouth! – no impure twistings – all purity; and the eyes – those eyes that seem to be looking into the very countenance of our divine Saviour with such holy devotion. There, there, now you see what Raphael is! It is one of the very sweetest heads Raphael ever painted.⁹⁰

In another conversation in front of Saint Catherine, with Henry Venn Lansdown (1806–1860), he observed of the saint: ‘there are personified the modesty and purity a man would wish to have in a wife’. Beckford’s ardent affinity with his prize partly explains why he stretched to acquiring such an expensive picture so soon after he had been in severe debt. In 1822 he had been obliged to sell Fonthill Abbey, the grandiose gothic revival country house in Wiltshire with its soaring tower that he had built at the turn of the century to the design of James Wyatt (1746–1813), along with all its furnishings and part of his art collection, raising £330,000. The huge revenue from the sale meant that he and his son‐in‐law, the 10th Duke of Hamilton (1767–1852), could buy back many choice pieces more cheaply than the prices Beckford had originally paid, due to the market being depressed. Evidently there was money left over for other new works he admired. Beckford’s purchase of such a rare and pre‐eminent work as Saint Catherine at this moment may have been provoked by William Hazlitt’s famously scathing review in the London Magazine of 1822 of the ‘idle rarities and curiosities’ assembled at Fonthill, the paintings dismissed as ‘mere furniture‐pictures’ among which he could discern ‘not one great work by one great name’.⁹¹

National Gallery, London

Beckford was obsessive about renewing and refining his displays, and rarely kept objects in his collection for long. In 1838, having perhaps tired of this new installation, he let it be known to a distinguished visitor to the house, the scholar, theologian and diplomat Baron Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen (1791–1860), that he might be prepared to sell the Raphael and one or two other paintings.⁹² Beckford probably chose to mention the possibility of a sale to him because Bunsen was influential in cultural affairs at the Prussian court with authority to buy valuable works of art on the king’s behalf. Beckford may have hoped to achieve a higher sum from the King of Prussia than from an English buyer. If such a negotiation was explored, it must have failed because Bunsen soon informed his brother‐in‐law, Sir Benjamin Hall (1802–1867), that Beckford was willing to part with some of his pictures, very likely encouraging Hall to write to his friend Thomas Spring Rice, who had recently become a Trustee of the National Gallery on account of his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer. At this time, the only Raphael in the Gallery was the Portrait of Pope Julius II (NG 27), which had been acquired on its foundation with John Julius Angerstein’s (1735–1823) collection in 1824, but was not truly representative of the artist’s style.⁹³ The opening of the spacious new building in Trafalgar Square in 1838 made the acquisition of works by Raphael the highest priority for Gallery officials, as had been implied in a Select Committee debate in the House of Commons on the constitution of the National Gallery two years before. The timing of a sale to the Gallery was propitious for Beckford. However, being averse to any publicity, he refused to deal directly with the government so Hall (referring to Beckford as ‘an extraordinary animal to deal with’) continued to conduct negotiations with Beckford’s agent on the Gallery’s behalf between December 1838 and February 1839.⁹⁴ At first Saint Catherine was offered with a painting by Claude but this was soon substituted with paintings by Mazzolino (NG 169) and Garofalo (NG 170). Bunsen relayed high valuations of 4,000 guineas for the Raphael and 1,200 guineas each for the other two paintings, suggesting that a total of 7,000 guineas should now be paid in order to secure the deal. On 22 February Hall announced that he had an agreement in writing from Beckford’s agent. Two days later it was said that Beckford had changed his mind, but by then the transaction had been completed.⁹⁵ The Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘under circumstances which precluded the possibility of his previously having their opinion on the subject’ (perhaps difficulties being thrown up by Beckford) went ahead and acquired all three pictures without formal discussion by the Trustees, who simply approved the purchase on 2 March 1839.

Subsequent history

On the eve of the Second World War, between 23 August and 2 September 1939, Saint Catherine was one of more than 1,800 pictures that were transported by train and road to Wales, where they were stored in various locations near Bangor and in Aberystwyth. After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, these locations were deemed unsafe due to the advance of the German front to the English Channel, bringing them within range of potential raids by German bombers. The Raphael was one of a total of about twenty‐five pictures, judged to be among the most valuable in the National Gallery (including Sandro Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity [NG 1034], Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna [NG 809], and works by Breughel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya and more), that were removed to the basement of the Eagle Tower of Caernarfon Castle.⁹⁶ Contemporary photographs show them ranged around the inside, hanging from wooden strips on the ancient stonework or stacked on wooden blocks against the walls. The Saint Catherine was hung high up just as she had been in the more propitious period of her history in the Borghese collection (fig. 25). These pre‐eminent paintings remained there between July 1940 and August 1941 when they were moved again, with the entire collection, to the slate galleries of Manod Quarry near Blaenau Ffestiniog, where they stayed for the duration of the war. The precautions proved justified. On the night of 12 October 1940, while the Saint Catherine was stored in Wales, the National Gallery was bombed.⁹⁷ A photograph shows the Raphael Room in ruins (fig. 26).

Copies

(as far as possible in chronological order)

• 1. Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, inv. D 4823 I F. XXXVI, pencil on oiled paper, stuck down in an album, 36.3 × 27.6 cm. Copy by Richard Cooper (1740–1814), who trained as a reproductive engraver and is best known for his landscape drawings and copy drawings after paintings by the old masters. He spent an extended period in Italy from 1771 to at the latest 1777, and would have seen the picture when it was in the Palazzo Borghese.⁹⁸ For a tracing by Cooper of the Garvagh Madonna in the same album, see NG 744.
• 2. Cambridgeshire, private collection, watercolour. Copy by F. Read (perhaps Frederick Read), after the original when in William Beckford’s collection, by whom signed on the reverse.⁹⁹ Datable to 1824 according to another inscription on the reverse in the hand of the dealer John Smith (for which see note 83).
• 3. North Tyneside, Quadrant, North Tyneside Council, inv. PCF33, oil on canvas, 72 × 55 cm. Copy by James Shotton (1824–1896), from North Shields, who attended the Royal Academy Schools and became a close friend of William Holman Hunt.
• 4. Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, National Trust, inv. NT343181.7, oil on panel, oval in shape, set into a piece of furniture, 27.9 × 20.3 cm. Copy by Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen Ferrers, later Mrs Edward Henege Dering (1830–1923), 1877.
• 5. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, inv. RF 8694r (Album Carpeaux 7, fol. 20, whole sheet 30.7 × 18.2 cm), charcoal sketch after the painting by the French sculptor Jean‐Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), probably made during his stay in London from March to December 1871.¹⁰⁰
• 6. Firle, Lewes, Charleston, inv. CHA/P/191, oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm. Copy by Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), about 1922 (fig. 16).¹⁰¹
• 7. Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, London, 22 March 1978, lot 146, 66 × 49 cm.¹⁰²
• 8. Sale, Bonhams Skinner, Boston, Massachusetts, lot 159, oil on canvas, 86.4 × 64.2 cm (framed), date unknown.
• 9. A copy mentioned by Passavant, formerly in the collection of Prince (? Sergei Petrovich, 1760–1860) Trubetskoy in St Petersburg, is now lost.¹⁰³

Prints

(in chronological order)

• 1. Anonymous (about 1600–1750), engraving, 25.8 × 18.4 cm (whole sheet).¹⁰⁴
• 2. Ferdinand Joubert (1810–1884), etching and engraving, on chine collé, 1820–4, 24.6 (trimmed) ×17.5 cm.¹⁰⁵
• 3. Auguste Gaspard Louis Boucher Desnoyers (1779–1857), engraving with etching, 42.6 × 32.3 cm (whole sheet).¹⁰⁶ Drawn while in Northwick’s collection in 1823 and published in 1824.
• 4. Paul Edme Le Rat (1842?–1892), etching, 1875, 21.2 × 16.0 cm.¹⁰⁷

Provenance

Probably in the collection of Cardinal Pier Paolo Crescenzi; in Scipione Borghese’s collection by 1633, and thence by descent; bought by Alexander Day and Pietro Camuccini around 1798–9, and offered for sale in London in 1800–1; offered again by William Buchanan in 1808; later (if not before) in the possession of Lord Northwick who eventually acquired full title in 1824; sold by John Smith, 26 January 1824, for £2615.5s., to William Beckford;¹⁰⁸ from whom purchased, 1839.

Framing

As mentioned under ‘Support’ above, the gesso barbe that survives along the top and lateral edges suggests that the picture originally may have been painted in an engaged frame. An inventory of 294 pictures in the Villa Borghese made prior to Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s death in 1633, which includes a description of the frame of almost every item in some detail, records that the picture was displayed (as an overdoor) in a ‘cornice di noce tocca d’oro con ovili dorati’ (‘a frame made of walnut wood, touched with gold, with gilded ovoli’).¹⁰⁹ It is the only frame with ovoli in the list, which suggests it may have retained an earlier, or even the original, frame when it was acquired by Scipione. In 1693, when in the Palazzo Borghese, it was recorded still in a carved and gilded frame.¹¹⁰ There is no description of the frame when the painting was acquired by the Gallery from William Beckford in 1839, but we know that it had a front‐opening glazed door when in his collection (see under ‘Previous owners’ above). The Keeper and Secretary of the National Gallery, Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812–1877), noted that the frame was (partly) regilded in 1857 and again in 1863.¹¹¹

Photographs from 1923 and 1928 (figs 27 and 28) show the painting in a deep hollow gilt frame, with acanthus ornament at the inner edge and low‐relief foliate ornament at the corners.¹¹² It is probable that this frame was the one in which the painting came to the Gallery from Beckford’s collection, particularly since the Mazzolino acquired from him at the same time also formerly had a similar frame, the design of which was popular in the period 1820–40.¹¹³ Beckford may have commissioned these for his new display in his dining room in Lansdown Crescent. The unsightly flat slip visible in the 1920s photographs, with bolts top left and right, still found on many National Gallery pictures, was probably a Gallery modification designed to facilitate the removal of the picture in an emergency. Francis Draper was commissioned to make further adjustments to this frame and that of the Mackintosh Madonna (NG 2069) in 1926.¹¹⁴ A photograph of about 1940, depicting the painting in wartime storage, shows the picture in its simple inner slip (fig. 25).

After the war, a carved and gilded sixteenth‐century Italian cassetta frame (F168) may have been purchased from the firm F.A. Pollak in the late 1940s.¹¹⁵ This has very recently been replaced by a sixteenth‐century giltwood and polychrome tabernacle frame (fig. 29).

Exhibitions

London 1800 (22); London 1808 (2, as from the Villa Aldobrandini); London 1816 (5, lent by Lord Northwick); Cheltenham 1915–18, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, long‐term loan, 3 June 1915 – 5 December 1918 ; London 1945 (no cat.); London 1992 (no cat.); London 2004–5 (74); London 2022 (26).

Notes

The author is grateful to the following for their assistance in the preparation of this entry: Maria Alambritis, Rachel Billinge, Caroline Campbell, Tom Henry, Mara Hofmann, Marina Minozzi, Nicholas Penny and Marika Spring.