The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

it up, in 1593. By Vanni (who, of course, will not be confused with Andrea di Vanni, Catherine’s contemporary and friend) is the picture on the right, painted in oil colours, where she is seen liberating a possessed woman from a demon; by him, too, are the figures of her two first biographers, the Blessed Raimondo da Capua and Frate Tommaso Nacci Caffarini, the authors of the Leggenda and the Leggenda minore respectively. Beautiful as the shrine is—and it would have been perfect in its harmony had only Bazzi completed the decorations—it is impossible at times not to feel that there is something more melodramatic in its treatment than quite accords with the simpler spirit of the dyer’s daughter of Fontebranda. The graffito work in coloured marble on the pavement represents Aesculapius among wild beasts. It is doubtful whether this is connected with the fact that several physicians of the Benzi family were buried in the chapel, or a part of the decorations in honour of the Saint.

San Domenico should be visited on the day of St Catherine’s Feast, which in Siena is kept on April 29th. The nave is hung with the bright banners of the contrade; Mass after Mass is offered up without intermission throughout the morning at the shrine, while crowds of the devout humbly and silently approach the altar, to be fed with that Bread of the Angels, “which,” says the collect for that day, “sustained even the temporal life of the blessed Virgin Catherine.” The curtain is raised, and behind the gilded bars of the shrine the pale, strange face appears, its features still recognisable. The altar blazes with candles and glares with artificial lilies, while natural flowers, lilies of the valley and white roses—more fitting tribute to her who so loved the simple flowers of the field—are offered up at the chapel rails. And, in this sudden advent of reality, Bazzi’s beautiful melodrama palls.

In the sacristy, on this day, are shown certain other relics—her discipline; her portable altar-stone; the sacramental cloths which she made for it with her own hands; the bull from Pope Gregory at Avignon granting her the dispensation to have Mass upon it wherever she went; and one of her fingers. The latter relic is—somewhat unfittingly—carried in procession through the church at sunset. The sacristy contains a banner painted with the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin by Bazzi.

The chapel on the right of the entrance, the Cappella delle Volte, over which is a large painted Crucifix of the fifteenth century, was not separated from the rest of the church in the days of St Catherine, as it is now. It was the chapel in which she habitually prayed, and by one of its pillars she knelt always, to hear Mass in the church below. Here her visions came to her, here had she those strange mystical revelations of the Divine Word. “Disposing wondrous ascensions in her heart, Catherine went up these steps, to pray in the chapel to Christ her Spouse.” Thus runs the writing over the original steps, piously preserved and guarded by bars, on the left, by which Catherine mounted into the cell of mystery; not those modern ones by which we now go up into the little chapel that witnessed this wondrous union of a woman’s mind and heart with the suprasensible.

It is somewhat bare to-day, painfully coated with modern paint and whitewash. It is hung with paintings representing scenes from her life and death, of little value from an artistic point of view, though one—that of her walking with her Master and Spouse—has a certain pathos and sweetness. Two narrow pictures over the entrance—representing her giving the cross of her rosary, and clothing the Divine Beggar with her robe—are earlier and better than the larger canvasses. But over the altar is a priceless treasure, the famous portrait of her by her friend and correspondent Andrea di Vanni, perhaps painted in her life-time and in any case her authentic likeness, in which the mantellata is giving her hand to kiss to a kneeling follower of her own sex—in the way to which (when men were concerned) such exception was taken during her life. In the centre of the chapel a piece of the old pavement where she trode—walked with Christ, in the phrase of the legend—is religiously preserved. Elsewhere, marble tablets on the floor are marked with heart, cross or robe, and inscribed: “Christ changeth heart with Catherine”; “Catherine bestoweth her cross on Christ”; “Catherine clothes Christ with her robe.” For into this chapel, as into others, the beggars came—and among them the disguised Spouse of her soul. Still may we see the pillar against which she leaned in her ecstasies—the pillar that is idealised in Bazzi’s two frescoes on either side of the shrine below—though now it is covered and modernised like the rest of the chapel. An inscription hung upon it—a seventeenth century copy of one of much older date (but not earlier than her canonisation)—strikes the keynote of the whole chapel, and I will therefore translate it in full:—

“In this chapel, there befell many wonderful actions to St Catherine of Siena, among the which are those set down below, as the blessed Raimondo her confessor telleth, and they are also known by ancient tradition, besides the many others that befell in this present church.

“Here she was clothed in the habit of St Dominic, and she was the first virgin who up to that time had been thus clothed.

“Here she stayed apart to hear the divine offices, and here continually had she divine colloquies, conversing familiarly with Jesus Christ her Spouse. Here she said the divine office, she had frequent ecstasies, and for the most part in these she used to lean against this pilaster, in one of which ecstasies she was zealously portrayed by a painter on the wall outside of this chapel.[111] And from that time this pilaster has been, and still is formidable to the furies of Hell, and many persons possessed of devils have been delivered thereby.