The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena

Around 1600, when this canvas was painted in the workshop of Agostino Carracci, showing Saint Catherine of Siena with the wounds of Christ was still a delicate matter. Catherine belonged to the Dominican order, and the stigmata were the glory of Saint Francis. In the 1470s a Franciscan pope, Sixtus IV, ordered them removed from her images, and Dominican writers were still defending them a century later. Her biographer, Raymond of Capua, offered a way through. He wrote that she received the wounds at Pisa in 1375 and prayed for them to stay hidden, so that they showed only at her death. The museum's Italian title names that moment. Two angels hold her up, her eyes are closed, and small red marks have appeared on the backs of her hands, near the crown of thorns, the heart and a spray of lilies.