Saint Cecilia

Cecilia became the patron saint of music through a line in the liturgy for her feast. It says that while instruments played at her wedding, she sang in her heart to God alone. Over time the words were read as if she herself made the music, and from the 15th century painters and sculptors began to show her with a small portable organ.

This statue holds just such an organ. The museum explains that the hand and the arm holding it are later additions, carved from a different stone, so that the saint's original identity is no longer certain. Restorers in the 19th century also remodelled her face, her plait of hair and the base, and scraped the surface so hard that no trace of colour remains. The museum still calls her the most famous of these life-size figures, for her iconography and the details of her dress, and also the one that can be judged with the least confidence.