DOROTEA, saint, martyr. – She is commemorated on 6 February. According to the highly legendary Passio, she was arrested during the persecution of Diocletian at Caesarea, where she had been born. After a first interrogation, she was entrusted to two apostate women so that they might persuade her to renounce the faith; instead, D. converted the two wretched women, also exhorting them to martyrdom. When all attempts to make her sacrifice proved fruitless, she was beheaded. Her cult was extremely popular in the Middle Ages; she is numbered among the 14 Holy Helpers (v.).
Much venerated in Germany, her images are frequent in German art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (sculptures in the Berlin Museum and in that of Freiburg im Br.; and by T. Riemenschneider in the Marienkirche of Würzburg), as well as paintings, including a fifteenth-century panel by the Swabian school in Karlsruhe, one by St. Lochner in Nuremberg, and that by Holbein the Elder in the Museum of Augsburg, where the martyrdom of the Saint is depicted.
Important representations of D. are also found in Italian art. Thus, in a polyptych by Ambrogio Lorenzetti now in the picture gallery of Siena, and in a fourteenth-century panel in the Museum of Pisa. Bernardino Luini depicted her with the palm and a book in the Church of San Maurizio
in Milan; Carlo Dolci represented her martyrdom in a painting now in Darmstadt.