Iconography

How St. Catherine is depicted: her attributes — the wheel, the sword, the book, the crown, the palm — and the contrast between the Eastern icon of the Great-Martyr and the Western painted theme of the mystical marriage. This file sets out the visual tradition, distinguishing the early Eastern image from the late Western flowering per METHODOLOGY §4.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great-Martyr)

The Most Recognizable of Saints

Catherine is one of the most easily recognized of all saints in Christian art, because her attributes are so distinctive and so consistent. Wherever a richly dressed young woman appears beside a spiked wheel — whole or broken — she is Catherine of Alexandria; the wheel is her unfailing sign. Around it the tradition gathers a cluster of further attributes, each keyed to her legend: the sword of her beheading; the book of her learning; the crown of her royal birth and her martyr’s victory; the palm of martyrdom; and sometimes the ring of the heavenly Bridegroom. The consistency of this iconographic vocabulary across centuries and across the East–West divide is itself a measure of how thoroughly the developed legend had fixed her image (the legend’s growth is traced in The Developing Legend).

The Wheel and the Other Attributes

The wheel is primary. It commemorates the engine of torture that shattered before her (see The Breaking Wheel), and it is shown either intact at her side or, often, broken, with the fragments at her feet — the broken wheel being the more pointed sign, the instrument of death defeated. From it she became patroness of the wheel-trades and lent her name to the “Catherine wheel” firework (see Patron of Philosophers and Students).

The sword recalls the beheading that the wheel’s failure made necessary (see The Beheading and the Milk); she is frequently shown holding it upright, sometimes with the wheel, as the two instruments of her passion. The book signifies her learning — the mark that defined her against the other virgin-martyrs (see The Learned Virgin) — and is the attribute that suits her patronage of scholars and students. The crown carries a double sense: in the developed legend she is a king’s daughter, “born in the purple,” and the crown is also the martyr’s crown of victory. The palm is the universal sign of martyrdom. In Western images she is sometimes shown trampling the emperor — Maxentius in that tradition — beneath her feet, the defeated tyrant under the triumphant virgin.

In the Orthodox icon Catherine appears as the Great-Martyr: a young woman of royal bearing, richly robed and crowned, holding a cross (the sign of the martyr) and often a scroll, with the wheel present as her identifying attribute. The icon’s emphasis is on her martyric witness and her dignity, not on narrative drama; it presents the saint the Eastern Church venerates rather than illustrating the episodes of the legend.

The Eastern Icon and the Western Mystical Marriage

The deepest division in Catherine’s iconography is the one between East and West, and it follows exactly the division traced in this collection’s treatment of the mystical marriage (see East and West).

[Disputed (East/West distinction per METHODOLOGY §4): the developed “Mystical Marriage of St Catherine” — the Christ Child placing a ring on her finger — is the dominant Western iconographic theme of Catherine from the early fourteenth century onward (Barna da Siena c. 1340; Fra Angelico; Memling c. 1479–80; Correggio c. 1525–28; Parmigianino), but it “is not a traditional subject in Orthodox icons,” where Catherine is depicted as the Great-Martyr with her cross, crown, and wheel. The East has the textual betrothal (in the Metaphrastic tradition) but not the developed image-cult (en.wikipedia.org, “Mystical marriage of Saint Catherine”; treated in East and West).]

The contrast is instructive. The Western painters made Catherine, above all, the bride of the mystical marriage — the kneeling young woman receiving the ring from the Christ Child on the Virgin’s lap, a subject of tenderness and courtly beauty that became one of the staples of Renaissance Marian painting, from the serene Italian treatments of Fra Angelico to the dramatic sensuousness of Correggio and the quiet Northern intimacy of Memling. The Eastern icon, by contrast, keeps Catherine the Great-Martyr: crowned, robed, holding the cross, the wheel beside her — an image of witness and victory, not of espousal. Two traditions, built on the same legend, produced two different images of the same saint; and the difference between them is the difference between a devotional theme of the later medieval West and the martyric veneration of the Christian East (see The Spread of the Cult).

The Iconography and the Source Problem

A closing observation belongs to the source-critical frame of the whole collection. The richness and consistency of Catherine’s iconography can give an impression of solidity that the historical record does not support: a saint so universally and so recognizably depicted feels well-attested. But the iconography, like the legend it illustrates, is late — the earliest depictions are no older than the eighth century, and the defining Western image, the mystical marriage, is no older than the fourteenth (see The Absence of Early Evidence and The Developing Legend). The Oxford Dictionary of Saints lists precisely the absence of early depiction among the grounds for doubting her historicity: there is “no depiction in early works of art” (Farmer, s.v. “Catherine of Alexandria”). The thousand windows and panels of Catherine are evidence of the cult’s medieval triumph, not of the saint’s fourth-century existence — the same lesson the whole collection draws, that vividness and ubiquity in the tradition are not the same as attestation in the record.

See Also

References

  • “Mystical marriage of Saint Catherine.” Wikipedia. (The Western painted theme; the painters and their dates; “not a traditional subject in Orthodox icons.”)
  • “Catherine of Alexandria.” Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki. (The attributes: wheel, sword, book, crown, palm; the Orthodox Great-Martyr image.)
  • Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, s.v. “Catherine of Alexandria.” (“No depiction in early works of art.”)
  • Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), c. 1260. Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The legend behind the attributes.)
  • “Correggio: The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine.” Encyclopædia Britannica. (The Renaissance image.)