Catherine of Bologna

She is best known as a saint. Caterina de' Vigri, canonised in 1712, spent her life as a Poor Clare nun, the order of women who follow Saint Clare of Assisi in strict poverty, and became abbess of the Corpus Domini convent in Bologna, which she helped found. She wrote a treatise on the spiritual life, The Seven Spiritual Weapons, and recorded her visions with unusual plainness.

She was also an artist, and that is why her name reaches this catalogue. Raised at the court of Ferrara, where the ruling Este family kept one of Italy's most cultivated households, she learned Latin, music and drawing, and carried those skills into the convent. She lettered and illuminated her own breviary by hand and painted small devotional panels; a little picture of Saint Ursula and her companions in the Gallerie dell'Accademia is given to her.

Centuries later the Church made her the patron saint of artists. Her body, found uncorrupted after her death in 1463, still sits upright in a chapel of the Corpus Domini in Bologna, dressed and visible to visitors.