Saint Clotilde

The museum dates this canvas 1888 to 1889 and leaves the bracket open, because nothing narrows it further. Sorolla was in his mid-twenties, still living in Italy on the Valencian scholarship that had sent him to Rome, newly married to Clotilde García del Castillo, the daughter of a Valencian photographer, and the two of them spent a long stretch in Assisi. What he made there is a devotional picture of a kind he never returned to, a saint in profile against a gold ground patterned with flat medieval ornament, with lilies, a book and a cross at her breast. Those attributes fit a dozen saints and settle nothing. The museum now gives her as Santa Clotilde, which is also his wife's name, while older records call her a saint at prayer and an Italian saint, and the identification has never been agreed. The canvas hung in the painter's own house for the rest of his life, and it stands in the background of his 1906 portrait of Clotilde in black. The Prado bought it from a private owner in 1993 and keeps it in store.