Portrait of a Woman as Saint Catherine (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman as Saint Catherine (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pier Francesco Foschi (Italian, 1502–1567).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a Christian, was martyred for refusing to make sacrifices to idols as decreed by the pagan Roman emperor Maxentius. While Maxentius first attempted to slay Catherine with spiked wheels, the machine broke when she prayed for salvation, and the emperor subsequently beheaded her. Catherine is identified in portraits through objects related to her martyrdom, such as a broken wheel, or a palm branch symbolizing the victory of the eternal spirit over mortal flesh. In sixteenth-century Florence, patrician women were often portrayed as such exemplary figures, indicating the virtues of the sitter.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman as Saint Catherine
• Date: c. 1560
• Creator attribution: Pier Francesco Foschi (Italian, 1502–1567)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 116 x 93 x 11 cm (45 11/16 x 36 5/8 x 4 5/16 in.); Unframed: 95 x 71.3 cm (37 3/8 x 28 1/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.825

A detail from the museum

The spiked wheel identifies this woman as the Christian martyr Saint Catherine.

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hollenden Gallery, James Jackson Jarves, and Liberty Emery Holden. Handbook for Visitors to the Hollenden Gallery of Masters: Exhibited at the Boston Foreign Art Exhibition in 1883-4. S.l: J.J. Jarves, 1883
• Berenson, Mary Logan. "Dipinti italiani in Cleveland, USA." Rassegna d'arte, VII (January 1907): 3
• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.