Saints Catherine and Dorothea

Two crowned saints stand on separate small panels, which were probably the wings of a little altarpiece for private prayer or the doors of a cabinet for sacred objects. Catherine of Alexandria rests a hand on the broken, spiked wheel of her martyrdom and holds the palm with just two fingertips. The museum compares that gesture to the aristocratic ease of the figure weaving garlands in the Madonna of the Rose Garden, which hangs in this museum too.

The second saint carries a book and a slender red cross, and at her feet a small boy in a blue tunic holds up a tray of roses. That tray names her. In the legend of Dorothea, a lawyer named Theophilus mocked her on the way to her execution, asking her to send him roses and fruit from the garden of her heavenly bridegroom. After her death a child brought them to him in winter, and he was converted. The room label calls her Dorothea, while other museum texts name her Veneranda. Carpaccio painted the pair around 1485 to 1490, and the museum sees the angel turned into a page.