[38] Ibid. Vol. II, ed. 1890, pp. 541, 542.
[39] Œuvres de Fénelon, Paris, Lebel, Vol. IX, 1828, pp. 632, 652, 668.
[40] Tractatus de Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, cap. xiv, § 47.
[41] Summa c. Gentiles, 1-3, c. 70, in fine.
[42] For the recent instances, see Walter Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker, New York, 1894, p. 369; The Treatise on Purgatory, by St. Catherine of Genoa, with a Preface by Cardinal Manning, 1858, 1880, 19—; F. W. Faber’s All for Jesus, ch. ix, sections iii-v; Aubrey de Vere’s Legends and Records of the Church and the Empire, 1898, pp. 355, 356; George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings, 1898, pp. 111-130.
[43] I have done my best to recover the day, or at least the month, but in vain. The baptismal register of her Parish Church (the Duomo) is, as regards that time, destroyed or lost.
[44] Not a shadow of reasonable doubt is possible as to the authenticity of these relics. Buried as she was in the Church of the Hospital of Pammatone, which latter she had first simply served, and then directed and inhabited, during thirty-seven years, her resting-place remained a centre of unbroken devotion up to her Beatification and Canonization, when the relics were removed but a few yards upwards, and placed in their glass shrine above and behind the altar in the Chapel of the Tribune—the Deposito di S. Caterina—where they have rested ever since. The special character of the brow and of the hands is still plainly recognizable. Of the four or five portraits mentioned by Vallebona, not one can be traced back to her lifetime.
In the Manuale Cartularii of the Pammatone Hospital, under date of 10th July 1512 (p. 62), (I quote from an authentic copy which I found among various documents copied out by the protonotary P. Angelo Giovo, and prefixed to his MS. Latin life of the Saint preserved in the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana, Genoa, No. 30, 8, 140,) there is an entry of money (7 lire 10 soldi, equivalent to about £7 10s.) paid by the administrators of the Hospital to Don Cattaneo Marabotto, her Confessor and Executor: “Ratio sepulturae q(uondam) D(ominae) Catarinettae Adurnae pro diversis expensis factis p(er) D(ominum) Cattaneum Marabottum, videlicet pro pictura et apportari facere lapides ipsius sepulturae.” The payment must have been either for expressly painting a picture, or for buying one already painted. We would, however, expect, in the former case, for the entry, in analogy with its final clause, to run: “pro pingi facere picturam.” In the latter case, we are almost forced to think of the picture as painted by some friend or disciple of the Saint, not for herself or for her relations or friends (for in that case it would hardly have been sold, but would have been left or given to the Hospital), but for his own consolation, or in hopes of its being eventually bought for the Hospital (and this may well have been done during her lifetime). In any case, this entry attests that a portrait of the Saint was in existence at the Hospital not two years after her death, and which was approved of by one of her closest friends. I take it that that portrait was placed on her sepulchral monument erected to her in January 1512 in the Hospital Church. If still extant, at least in a copy, that original or copy is, presumably, at the Hospital still.
Now there are but three pictures at the Hospital which claim to be portraits of her and are not, avowedly, copies. (1) The large oil painting of her standing figure, in the room adjoining the closet now shown as the place where she died, is clearly a late, quite lifeless composition. (2) The portrait-head in the Superioress’s room has been carefully examined for me by a trained portrait painter, who reports that the picture consists of a skilful ancient foundation now largely hidden under much clumsy repainting. (3) The picture reproduced at the head of this first volume, now in the sacristy of the Santissima Annunziata in Portorio (the Hospital Church), is clearly the work of one hand alone. It is without the somewhat disagreeable look present in the previous portrait, a look doubtless introduced there by the unskilful restoration. If then the sacristy picture is a copy of the Superioress’s picture, it will have been copied before the latter picture was thus repainted. This sacristy picture now hangs in an old-fashioned white-and-gold wooden frame with “Santa Catarina da Genova” in raised letters carved out upon it, a carving which is evidently contemporary with the frame’s make. The frame thus cannot be older than 1737, the year of Catherine’s canonization. But the portrait is without trace of a nimbus and carefully reproduces the very peculiar features of a particular face, head, and neck.
The original painting, thus still more or less before us in these two pictures, was evidently by no mean artist, and strikes a good connoisseur as of the school of Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519). There were several good painters of this school resident in Genoa about this time: Carlo da Milano, Luca da Novara, Vinzenzo da Brescia, and Giovanni Mazone di Alessandria. In the very year of her death, and still more two years later, she was publicly and spontaneously venerated as Blessed, and this Cultus continued unbroken up to the Bull of Urban VIII, of 1625. Hence the further back we place one or both of these portraits, the more naturally can we explain the absence of the nimbus. Everything conspires, then, to prove that one of these portraits goes back, in some way, to the picture painted for or bought by Marabotto, and which adorned her monument from 1512 to 1593.