Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Barbara Longhi spent her whole life in Ravenna, working in the busy workshop of her father, the painter Luca Longhi. That was one of the few doors open to a woman who wanted to paint in the late 1500s, and she made small, carefully finished devotional pictures for local churches and private homes. This is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, remembered as a learned young noblewoman who out-argued the emperor's philosophers and was condemned to die on a spiked wheel. Painters gave her that wheel and a martyr's palm so a viewer would know her at a glance. Longhi worked at the height of the Counter-Reformation, when the church wanted images that were clear, calm, and devout rather than showy. Few of her paintings ever left Ravenna, and she signed a number of them, still an unusual thing for a woman of her time to do.