Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Around 1598, Caravaggio was a young painter living in the Rome household of Cardinal del Monte, his first important patron, and it was almost certainly the cardinal who commissioned this. Saint Catherine was a Christian princess of Alexandria who, the legend says, out-argued the emperor's philosophers and was condemned to die on a spiked wheel. The wheel shattered at her touch, so they beheaded her instead. Caravaggio gives her all of it at once. She kneels on a red cushion, leaning on the great broken wheel, the executioner's sword laid across her lap, the martyr's palm beside her. What makes it unforgettable is that she is not a distant holy figure. She looks like a real woman, caught in a shaft of hard light against deep shadow, and she is. The model is thought to be Fillide Melandroni, a well-known Roman courtesan Caravaggio painted more than once. She's dressed in the fine clothes of his own day, and she turns and meets your eye directly, calm, holding the sword that killed her as though she is simply showing it to you.