Carvings on the north side – St. Catherine of Alexandria. Photo: Robert F. Rodriguez.
St. Catherine, the second figure on the north side of the Martyrs Portal, was a princess, the daughter of the legendary King Costus and Queen Sabinella of Cyprus and Alexandria. The many Renaissance paintings of her invariably depict her as an expensively-dressed noblewoman with flowing locks topped by a coronet, as in the painting below by the Master of the Legend of St. Lucy.
John Angel breaks with this tradition, dressing Catherine in the everyday apparel of a third-century Roman matron. Rather than royal robes, she wears a voluminous mantle known as palla over an ankle-length stola. A simple head scarf replaces the customary coronet. Only one stray lock of her hair is visible. But her regal bearing betrays her noble birth.
Her right hand rests on a broken wheel, an element in the story of her martyrdom. She lifts a small cross with her left hand, the symbol of the faith she adopted after turning away from her pagan upbringing. Her left arm is discolored with what master stonecutter Stephen Boyle suggests is gypsum pollution build up.
Beneath the feet of St. Catherine is the Roman emperor Maxentius, who sentenced Catherine to death. He ordered that she be tortured to death on a wheel, but an angel shattered the wheel.. Photo: Robert F. Rodriguez.
We are startled to see her feet resting upon a severed head. Here Angel revives the visual trope of hagiographic art known as “the persecutor underfoot,” where martyrs stand or sit triumphantly atop the image of their persecutors. In Catherine’s case, the persecutor is the Roman emperor Maxentius (c. 283-312). The Flemish painting above has another, slightly less ghoulish, example of the trope.
The pedestal depicts two episodes in the life of St. Catherine –her mystical marriage to Christ on the left and her martyrdom under Maxentius on the right.
The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine
What exactly is a mystical marriage?
The idea of a mystical marriage has roots in both the Old and New Testaments. The lovers in the Hebrew Song of Songs are commonly understood as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel. In the New Testament, the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to a marriage by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. At several points in the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as “the bridegroom.” In Revelation, John has a vision of “the marriage supper of the Lamb,” again a metaphor for the union of Christ and the Church.
The idea of a mystical marriage between Christ and specific individuals emerges later. The religious philosopher Louis Dupré explains that the permanence of the mystical marriage distinguishes it from the transient mystical experiences in which the faithful may experience an overpowering sense of God’s presence.
The final state of permanent union is characterized by an uninterrupted awareness of God’s presence … A divided consciousness enables the mystic to take care of ordinary duties, even to suffer and to be disturbed on one level while preserving tranquility on another … No pain or unrest enters that inner sanctuary.
Only a select few attain the high degree of holiness required to enter into the mystical marriage. Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre, a 19th-century French physician who researched the topic, claimed to have identified seventy-seven such marriages in Christian history.
The mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria is by far the best known and the most frequently depicted in art. Her 14th-century namesake, St. Catherine of Siena, probably takes second place. The two Catherines are easy to tell apart, for the Alexandrian usually wears a crown and the Sienese her Dominican nun’s habit.
Catherine’s mystical marriage is depicted on the left side of the pedestal beneath her niche. Catherine kneels before the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. (Christ appears as a child in most representations of the mystical marriage, perhaps to dispel any notions of physical intimacy.) From his seat on the Virgin’s lap, the Christ child places a ring on Catherine’s finger as she reverently bows her head.
An angel hovers above the wedding party, looking on benevolently. In a charming detail, a second angel perches in a niche behind the Virgin, strumming a lute and, one imagines, joyfully singing. The exquisite rendering of the lute’s bridge and strings is a testament to the painstaking work of the Ardolinos in realizing Angel’s model down to its smallest details.
The Cathedral’s Chapel of St. Ambrose houses another depiction of the mystical marriage. Set into the chapel’s reredos is a painting by Bartolomeo Ramenghi, also known as Bagnacavallo, a northern Italian painter of the early 16th century and a student of Raphael (to whom the painting was at one time misattributed).
The Virgin sits with the Christ child on her lap, her eyes cast downward to observe the child place a ring on the uplifted left hand of St. Catherine. The Virgin grasps the child’s left foot as if to help him rotate his chubby body and extend his arm. Catherine, her hair bound by a headband studded with gemstones, reverences them both as she receives the ring. In the background, a curtain is partially drawn back to reveal a landscape.
The Martyrdom of St. Catherine
to the far right. Photo: Robert F. Rodriguez.
The bases of the pedestals beneath the eight major figures of the Martyrs Portal are an irregular shape with a short face on their right corners. Angel often uses this corner to emphasize an important character or to transition to a new scene. On the corner of Catherine’s pedestal, we see a shift of scene signaled by the diagonal of the angel’s winged arm and the adjacent diagonal of Maxentius’s cloak as he wraps it around his shoulder, effectively placing a curtain between the drama’s two scenes.
The right half of the pedestal is devoted to the martyrdom of St. Catherine, or at least one episode of it. The best-known account is in the 13th-century collection of hagiographic legends and lore known as the Golden Legend – an invaluable resource for generations of visual artists, including John Angel.
Catherine’s path to martyrdom begins with her confronting the emperor Maxentius over the execution of Christians who refuse to offer sacrifice to pagan idols. She attempts to persuade him to abandon the folly of worshiping false gods and to turn to the true god, saying:
Thou shouldst rather marvel thee of heaven, and of the earth, and of all the things that be therein, and of the sun, the moon, the stars, and of the planets that have been since the beginning of the world, and shall be as long as it shall please God… (This and other quotations are from the Caxton translation of the Golden Legend).
Maxentius is taken aback by her erudition and skillful argumentation, as well as by her beauty. As a princess, Catherine received an excellent education in the liberal arts, including the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric – the art of spoken argument. Unable to refute her arguments himself, he gathers fifty distinguished philosophers to debate with her, with the expectation that their scholarship and sharp rhetorical skills will easily overcome hers.
Catherine’s debate with the philosophers is the scene on the right side of the pedestal. Catherine is seated with a page of text in her hands. Two philosophers stand before her. One of them points to a passage in the text. The passage is most likely a quotation from Plato’s Timaeus that Catherines cites in her counterargument to the philosophers. In the end, unable to resist Catherine’s powers of persuasion, all fifty convert to the Christian faith. Maxentius, furious, orders them burnt alive.
Nevertheless, entranced by her beauty, Maxentius begs Catherine to live in his palace and reign alongside him and his queen. Catherine rebuffs him, saying:
I am given and married to Jesu Christ, he is my spouse, he is my glory, he is my love, and he is my sweetness, there may not fair words nor torments call me from him.
Maxentius, enraged, has her scourged with scorpions and thrown into a dungeon with nothing to eat for twelve days. But angels visit to salve her wounds and a dove provides sustenance. All who encounter Catherine, from the queen and the captain of the guard to her jailers, fall under the aura of her holiness and convert to the Christian faith.
After twelve days, Maxentius releases Catherine from the dungeon and repeats his demand that she renounce her faith and join him at the palace or suffer a painful death. Catherine responds:
Tarry not to do what torments thou wilt, for I desire to offer to God my blood and my flesh like as he offered for me; he is my God, my father, my friend and mine only spouse.
Maxentius then devises a new horror – wheels with razor-sharp spikes. The Golden Legend’s explanation of how the wheels work is a bit confusing, but it appears that the spiked wheels face one another and rotate in contrary directions, like a giant meat grinder. But before the wheels can do their diabolical work, an angel soars down and shatters them. The damaged wheel has become Catherine’s primary attribute.
The exasperated Maxentius then has her beheaded. At the last moment, Catherine hears a voice: Come unto me, my fair love and my spouse; lo! behold the gate of heaven is open to thee. Milk, not blood, flows from her trunk, and angels transport her body to Mt. Sinai.
In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian established a monastery on Mt. Sinai on the site of the burning bush that spoke to Moses. Three centuries later, the relics of St. Catherine were translated to the monastery where they remain today. Now known as St. Catherine’s Monastery, it still houses Greek Orthodox monks and is the oldest continuously occupied Christian monastery in the world.
Postscript: Maxentius
It is probably a fool’s errand to fact-check the legends about the saints. As the great medieval scholar Emile Mâle said of the Golden Legend: “The book’s greatest charm lay less in the true than in the marvelous.”
Nevertheless, the historical record for Maxentius describes a man so different from the monster we meet in the Golden Legend, that I cannot conclude this article without speaking up for the maligned Maxentius.
The emperor Maxentius was not a madman, nor was he hostile to Christians. According to historian Timothy Barnes, rather than persecute Christians: “Maxentius granted the Christians of Italy and Africa the right to practice their religion freely very soon after he came to power in October 305.” Further, he later allowed Christians to recover property confiscated during Diocletian’s persecution.
A recent biography of Maxentius, Simon Turney’s Maxentius: The Last Great Roman, concurs with Barnes that Maxentius put an end to the persecution of Christians and even permitted the construction of new churches and Christian cemeteries in Rome, though he never adopted the faith himself.
So how did Maxentius acquire his bad reputation?
Maxentius was a rival to another contender for full command of the Roman Empire, Constantine. When the respective armies of Maxentius and Constantine met in the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine prevailed. While beating a chaotic retreat, Maxentius drowned as he was fording a river.
Once in power, Constantine continued Maxentius’s policy of legitimizing Christianity while vilifying the man himself, as Barnes explains:
Constantinian propaganda rapidly transformed Maxentius into a textbook tyrant who massacred his subjects, raped the wives of senators, and examined the entrails of pregnant women, infants, and lions for magical purposes.
The Constantinian propaganda apparently influenced the narrative of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, resulting in the almost comically villainous character we meet in the Golden Legend.
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Source
- “St. Catherine” in The Golden Legend, William Caxton translation, 1483. E-text by Paul Halsall. https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/
- Barnes, Timothy. Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (2013).
- Cameron, Averil. “The Reign of Constantine” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12 (2005).
- Dupré, Louis. “The Christian Experience of Mystical Union” in The Journal of Religion, January 1989.
- Stracke, Richard. “St. Catherine of Alexandria: The Iconography.” https://www.christianiconography.info/catherine.html
- Turney, Simon. Maxentius: The Last Great Roman (2026).