Catherine of Siena, Saint

CATHERINE OF SIENA, Saint. - Dominican, b. at Siena in 1347 (25 March according to tradition), d. at Rome on 29 Apr. 1380. Her father Jacopo Benincasa, a leather dyer in the Fontebranda district, had by Lapa Piagenti no fewer than twenty-five children, Catherine being the penultimate. Among the brothers are remembered: Benincasa, the eldest, Bartolo (who took as his wife Lisa Colombini) and Stefano. Among the sisters are known: Nicoluccia, Bonaventura, Lisa, Nera, Giovanna, Catherine's twin, and Vanna. The profoundly religious family environment influenced little Eufrosina, as she was called in the neighborhood, who was early drawn toward the spiritual life. At the age of 6 she had her first vision, at 7 she made a vow of virginity, imitating the anticorpi and desiring to be a missionary like the friars of St. Dominic of Camporeggi. At 12 her family was already thinking of a husband for her; she rebelled, insisting on a life of penance and exceptional asceticism. To overcome the family's resistance she cut her hair on the advice of the Dominican Tommaso della Fonte, provoking a persecution which her father Jacopo put an end to.

In 1363, after much insistence, she entered among the Mantellate of St. Dominic, dedicated to piety and works of mercy. Until 1370 Catherine's life unfolded in continuous asceticism, in the purification of her soul ascending toward the perfection of charity.

The mortifications, the works of penance and the prolonged fasts, while they made her a perfect mistress of her own inner life, aroused in Sienese religious circles a violent campaign of denigration and opposition, to which she responded by devoting herself all the more to the sick of the hospital of the Scala, of the leper house of St. Lazarus, and to the care of her ailing sisters, who often repaid her with atrocious calumnies.

What influence did the return of Urban V have on Catherine?

(18 Oct. 1367). The biographers tell us nothing, intent as they were on collecting prayers and prodigies. They also ignore Urban's return to Avignon (5 Sept. 1370), amid the desolation of the Italians who saw Italy once again falling into political anarchy; they ignore Catherine's sufferings over so great a calamity.

While Urban V was leaving Italy, Catherine in Fontebranda in an exceptional vision received the mandate to come out of contemplation in order to devote herself to the apostolate. First of all she created a spiritual family, chosen from among ecclesiastics, men of government, of letters or artists, men and women. Nor did she only pour into her disciples her intense spiritual experience, but she absorbed from them the theological and mystical thought of the schools to which they belonged: Benedictines, Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuates.

The fame of Catherine's holiness made Fontebranda a center of irradiation and attraction.

The epistolary collection was thus born out of need, duty and charity toward the many who came asking for advice, a word of good. She, without learning, dictated letters for the learned, the great and the men of letters.

Politics and religion in the Middle Ages were so fused and interpenetrated that they could not be dissociated, and Catherine did politics: not, however, in the modern sense. The Avignon Curia, which kept watch over the separatist movements of the Fraticelli, was afraid, and so was the Dominican Order; therefore Catherine was summoned to Florence at Pentecost of 1374 before the General Chapter of her Order to undergo a veritable trial. She won. To defend her from new attacks, the Order guaranteed her orthodoxy by giving her as director friar Raymond of Capua, of the delle Vigne family, a descendant of Peter, chancellor of Frederick II. Gregory XI, Urban's successor, prepares the Crusade and entrusts its propaganda also to Catherine, who goes to Pisa, a maritime center, and makes it her headquarters (1375). While she writes to kings and condottieri organizing and inciting, she receives, on 1 Apr., in the church of St. Christina on the Lungarno, the Stigmata.

Florence at that time, for many reasons, pursued an anti-papal policy, placing itself at the head of all the malcontents of the patrimony of St. Peter, with the ambitious dream of attacking and destroying the temporal power. It therefore sought to unite the Tuscan republics in a league, which, willingly or not, fell into the net. Catherine restrained Gambacorti of Pisa, and at Lucca she begged the Anziani not to join, she insisted with her own at Siena, but obtained little. In June 1375 she assisted on the scaffold Niccolò di Toldo, of Perugia, afterwards dictating the famous, wonderful letter.

The Florentine events press on, the war with the Pontiff seems inevitable despite the work of the Guelph party and of the Italian Republics to avert the scandal. While the Eight of War, sarcastically called the Eight Saints, push toward the break, they try to calm the three Avignon envoys who give cause to fear excommunication and interdict. And when in March 1376 the excommunication with the interdict against Florence was launched, Catherine was sent as ambassador of the Florentines to Avignon. She was received kindly, she disposed Gregory XI to indulgence, but in the meantime the war party in Florence gained the upper hand and the ambassadors sent to Avignon no longer recognized Catherine; who in a letter to Bonaccorso di Lapo harshly reproves the bad faith of the rulers. Catherine's presence in Avignon at the crucial moment of the papacy's return to Rome was decisive, revealing to the Pontiff the vow made on the day of his election.

The documentation is complete, but significant are the reticences of the disciples in attesting to the fact. The Western Schism, which followed upon the return, gave occasion for the accusations against the Saint as the cause of so great a calamity, compromising her canonization; the disciples therefore sought to reduce the importance of her work.

Gregory XI, after years of temporizing, finally departed on 16 Sept. 1376. Catherine with her followers departed the following day and reassured the Pontiff who at Genoa, urged once again by the cardinals, was thinking again of Avignon. Having returned to Siena, she made a journey into the Val d'Orcia to pacify the Salimbeni and to catechize those populations. But her heart was always in Florence, in struggle with the Pontiff, who ordered her to return to the turbulent city to work for peace. A difficult mission amid the agitation of passions and the struggles between factions, which in 1378 culminated in the tumult of the « ammoniti » which endangered Catherine's very life, and in the still graver one of the Ciompi. Meanwhile in March 1378 Gregory XI died and the peace negotiations with the related congress of Sarzana to resolve that problem of European interest failed. The new pontiff Urban VI hastened the solution of the problem, and finally on 18 July the olive branch of peace was hung at the Palazzo Vecchio amid the city's rejoicing. Catherine returned to Siena while the horizon was darkening, to continue her colloquy with the Eternal, dictating the wonderful Dialogo della divina Provvidenza, the fruit of her continuous teaching through the letters and of all her mystical experiences; the Dialogo is the true « book » of Catherine.

Meanwhile the new pontiff Urban VI, an Italian, after seven French popes, had, with his harsh character, offended the sensitivity of the cardinals and of the Curia, which was almost entirely French. The oppositions became so heated as to break out into open revolt, which culminated in the election of a new Pontiff: Clement VII, elected at Fondi on 20 September 1378. Thus began that schism which tore the Church apart for forty years, causing every idea of crusade or internal reform to fade. As early as 1375 C. had foreseen the coming schism; nevertheless she worked for the Pope's return to Rome, because Rome is the seat of the papacy and of its bishop, not Avignon. In November 1378 she came to Rome, summoned there by Urban VI, and spoke in Consistory, reanimating the Sacred College; she organized a veritable new Crusade, calling to Rome the most spiritual men; she formed her chancery to send messages and letters to the rulers and to the Italian Republics, to press them to adhere in Rome to the true Pontiff. C. intervened to calm the Pope's violence, worked for the capitulation of Castel Sant'Angelo, still in French hands (1379), and urged the condottiere Alberico da Barbiano to drive out the foreigner, defeated at Marino on 30 April 1379. In a riot organized by French emissaries, she used her authority to procure peace between the people and the Pope (February 1380), never ceasing to press Joanna of Naples, a supporter of Avignon, to bring her to recognize Urban VI, but in vain.

Exhausted by her immense labor, enthusiastically endured, she died on 29 April 1380 in a house near the Minerva (today piazza S. Chiara). She had three solemn funerals, or rather three triumphs: one ordered by the Pontiff, another by the senator Giovanni Cenci, and the third by the Dominican Order. Miracles flourished at her tomb, thus giving rise to a cult that grew in intensity in Rome and in the Church, which canonized her in 1461 under the pontificate of Pius II, Piccolomini. Pius IX declared her co-patroness of Rome, and Pius XII principal patroness of Italy together with St. Francis of Assisi (1939). Art has made her the object of its manifestations, as have poetry and literature. Feast day 30 April.

She is buried in Rome in the Church of the Minerva beneath the high altar. The sarcophagus is attributed to Isaia da Pisa (1430). The head of the Saint is instead in Siena in S. Domenico, in the chapel frescoed by Sodoma.

The critical problem. — The principal hagiographic source is the biography written by her confessor Bl. Raymond of Capua in 1393, published by the Bollandists, of which, however, there is still no critical edition. It was called Legenda maior to distinguish it from the minor or abbreviated ones written by Fra' Tommaso Caffarini, Fra' Massimino da Salerno, etc. Caffarini also composed a Supplementum, in which he gathered the material that had escaped Fra' Raymond, especially the Miracula, which were notebooks in which the Saint's first confessors, Fra' Tommaso della Fonte and Fra' Bartolomeo Dominici, transcribed the miracles, visions and prayers. Other disciples, such as Fra' Guglielmo d'Inghilterra, an Augustinian, and Giovanni delle Celle (v.), a Vallombrosan, published discourses in her praise. Thus we have an account of her passing by Barduccio Canigiani; and from an anonymous Florentine we have an important document, the Miracoli, written in 1374 during her stay in Florence. Other disciples, such as Pagliaresi, Iacopo del Pecora and Anastasio da Montalcino, left us chapters in verse in her honor, published in an appendix to the Dialogo. All this material is partly published in the Fonti cateriniane, published under the care of the University of Siena, and partly in the old editions.

Some good critical essays on her life and letters had been published by Lazzareschi, by Motzo and by others, but a complete critical work on the Catherinean hagiographic sources was undertaken by Roberto Fawtier of the French School of Rome, who in 1921 published vol. I, in which he examines all the hagiographic material, reaching completely negative conclusions. Except in some minor writings, the principal biographers, Fra' Raymond of Capua and Fra' Tommaso Caffarini, he says, consciously disfigured the true C. This so radical verdict caused scandal among students of Catherinean studies, but in the end it was beneficial in spurring many foreign and Italian scholars to re-examine the sources, reaching less radical, more just and objective conclusions.

Fawtier published in 1930 vol. II on the works of C., in which he rectified many assertions contained in vol. I, proceeding with greater maturity and judiciousness.

The new studies of Jordan, Mandonnet, Dupré Theseider and Fr. Laurent, but especially those of Valli and Conti, yield the result: that the C. seen and described by the disciples is the same as that of the Epistolario, the Dialogo and the Pregliere: there is neither deformation nor substantial alteration. Fawtier in the last volume, published in 1948 (La double expérience), is less radical than in 1921, more diplomatic, but always prejudiced against the Saint's disciples, insisting on the complete failure of the "human experience of St. C."

It was necessary, however, to make the rich Catherinean material available to scholars with critical editions, and this has been largely accomplished by the University of Siena for the hagiographic sources, and, for the letters, by the Istituto storico italiano per il medioevo.

The first edition of the Lettere, numbering 37, is the Bolognese one of 1492; there follows the editio princeps of 1500 by Aldo Manuzio with 350 letters, reprinted several times during the 16th century. Girolamo Gigli gave a more complete and correct edition of it, enriched by the erudite notes of the Jesuit Burlamacchi, then reprinted many times in the 18th and 19th centuries, until Niccolò Tommaseo in 1860 made a new edition of it with chronological and philological criteria, reprinted by Misciattelli in 1913-20 and later by Ferretti with good notes and the addition of the unpublished letters discovered in the meantime, and those of the disciples already published by Grattanelli in 1868. Fedele charged E. Dupré Theseider with undertaking for the Istituto storico italiano per il medioevo the critical edition of the epistolary; in 1940 vol. I appeared with 98 datable letters, preceded by an exhaustive critical introduction. Dupré Theseider had the rare fortune of discovering the autograph of Pagliaresi, the Saint's secretary, in the Palatine Library of Vienna, a codex that resolved many problems that seemed insoluble.

Of the prayers (numbering 26) see the recent critical edition of Fr. Taurisano (2nd ed., Rome 1932).

Innocenzo Taurisano

ICONOGRAPHY

The Catherine iconography is copious; and this is due mainly to the fact that the city which gave birth to the Saint and which in every century paid her a filial cult was, as is well known, a most fervent center of art: indeed, the Catherine iconography up to the whole of the 15th century is almost exclusively Sienese.

The oldest "portrait" of the Saint (14th century) is the one painted in fresco by Andrea Vanni in the church of St. Dominic in Siena; removed from its original location together with the wall behind it, it was later placed on the altar of the adjoining chapel of the Völte; since Vanni was on familiar terms with the Saint (three letters addressed to the painter are preserved), the importance of the small fresco appears increased by the probability that it - albeit through the morphological elaboration typical of Vanni's style - reproduces the real features of C. The work, although in not good condition, and repainted in some places, is of high value, full of intimacy and delicacy: perhaps it is Vanni's masterpiece. Another expressive "portrait" is the reliquary bust of the Sacred Head, in embossed copper, executed by an unknown goldsmith of the early 15th century and now preserved in the municipal library of Siena: here the Saint has a youthful appearance; admirable is the contrast between the firmness of the lines, of the most polished volumes, and the extraordinary energy that radiates from the eyes. With greater freedom and variety in the features, but always with deep religiosity and with most happy artistic results, Lorenzo di Pietro, called il Vecchietta, depicted the Saint several times, both in complex works such as the Arliquiera already in the sacristy of the hospital of St. Mary della Scala (1445; now in the picture gallery of Siena, no. 204), the triptych of the cathedral of Pienza (1461), and in isolation as in the beautiful fresco (1461) in the hall of the Mappamondo of the Palazzo Pubblico: to the Vecchietta has also recently been attributed an original terracotta statue in which St. C. is depicted sleeping: this statue is found in a small room pertaining to the Confraternity of St. Catherine under the Völte of the Hospital, in which tradition holds precisely that the Saint used to take refuge to rest briefly when she assisted the sick. The best-known statue of the Saint is the polychrome wooden one, attributed to Nereccio di Bartolomeo (second half of the 15th century), which is venerated on the high altar of the church of St. Catherine in Fontebranda of the contrada dell'Oca.

There are various pictorial cycles in which the main events of the life of Benincasa have been organically illustrated. The oldest and most important of them consisted of a series of small panels that surrounded the great altarpiece with the Presentation in the Temple, commissioned in 1447 from Giovanni di Paolo by the University of the pizzicali of Siena for the church of St. Mary della Scala: the great central panel is now in the picture gallery of Siena (no. 211), while of the Catherine story scenes, which began with the Gift of the Cloak to the Beggar and ended with the Funeral of the Saint, one is lost and the others have been dispersed among the Stoclet collection of Brussels, the Lehman collection and the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Institute of Arts of Minneapolis. Although they constitute the most valuable figurative commentary on the life of the Saint, they are nevertheless much less known than the frescoes of Sodoma (1526) and of Francesco Vanni (1593) painted on the walls of the chapel of St. Catherine in the basilica of St. Dominic in Siena: in particular the two scenes of the Ecstasy and the Fainting, for their dramatic and sentimental character, have achieved wide popularity. Other cycles are those that adorn the various oratories of the Catherine sanctuary; in the so-called "oratory of the Kitchen" the narrative unfolds in thirteen pictures, plus the panel on the altar, with the Stigmata, by Bernardino Fungai, due to various painters between the end of the 16th century and the early 17th: A. Salimbeni, P. Sorri, C. Roncalli called il Pomarancio, L. Bonastri, A. Casolani, F. Vanni and R. Manetti; in the underlying church of St. Catherine, or "oratory of the contrada", some Miracles of the Saint are instead illustrated with frescoes by G. del Pacchia and V. Salimbeni; finally another, mediocre, cycle of seven scenes frescoed by Alessandro Franchi (1896) is found in the so-called "oratory of the chamber". The ensemble of the panel and the predella (the latter unfortunately mutilated) in which D. Beccafumi illustrated the Supernatural Events (Stigmata, Mystical Marriage, Communion and Miraculous Vestition) of the life of the Saint can also be considered an organic cycle: this work (datable to around 1515), coming from the destroyed monastery of Monteoliveto at Porta Tufi, is now preserved in the picture gallery of Siena (nos. 417, 418, 419 and 420). It is one of the highest Catherine iconographic interpretations, and stands among the masterpieces of the great Sienese 16th-century painter.

A subject that from 1500 onward has always lent itself to free and fanciful interpretations is the Mystical Marriage (v., e.g., the great panel by Beccafumi in the Chigi Saracini collections of Siena and the numerous versions by F. Vanni and Salimbeni). In comparison with the great fortune of these subjects, in which the mystical and supernatural element clearly prevails, the illustration of the historical events in which the Saint was the protagonist appears rather scanty; the Sienese particularly remembered the Canonization of the Saint, several times represented by Pinturicchio in the Piccolomini library, by F. Vanni, and by Mattia Preti in a large canvas in the chapel of the Völte. Finally, it should be observed how, on the occasion of a national competition for a painting on a Catherine subject held on the sixth centenary of the birth of the Saint, the sensibility of modern artists, unlike that of the ancients, turned decisively toward strongly animated or dramatic subjects, such as the Torture of Niccolò di Tuldo, the Burial of the leprous Tecca, the Healing of the possessed woman and the Assistance to the mantellata Andrea. - See Pl. LXIV.

Enzo Carli