Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Murillo painted this Saint Catherine in Seville around 1650, when he was still young and the city was living through hard years of plague and decline. He shows the martyr close up, lit sharply from the left against a plain dark ground, holding the sword she was killed with and the palm branch of martyrdom. There is no landscape or story around her, only the figure looking straight out, so that the sacred image comes close to an ordinary portrait. The painting later travelled far from Seville: Marshal Soult took it during the Napoleonic occupation in 1810, and it passed through Scottish, Swiss and London hands, at one point catalogued as another painter's work, before it was returned to Murillo and to the city.