2. Catherine’s physical appearance; her qualities and habits of body and of mind.
In this house, then, Catherine grew up and lived till she was sixteen. The beautiful, tall figure; the noble oval face with its lofty brow, finely formed nose, and powerful, indeed obstinate chin; the winning countenance with its delicate complexion and curling, sensitive, spiritual mouth-line; deep grey-blue spiritual eyes; the long, tapering fingers; the massive dark brown or black hair; still more the quickly and intensely impressionable, nervous and extremely tense and active physical and psychical organization; and then the very affectionate, ardent, aspiring, impatient and absolute qualities and habits of her mind and heart and will,—all these things we are not merely told, we can still see them and find them, in part, even in her remains, but more fully in her portrait, and above all, in her numerous authentic utterances.[44]
3. The few certain details concerning her early years. Santa Maria delle Grazie.
We have, as only too often in such older biographies, but very few precise and characteristic details concerning her early years. She had in her room a Pietà, a representation of the Dead Christ in His Mother’s arms, and we are told how deeply it affected her every time she entered this room, and raised her eyes up to it. The other points mentioned, her early bodily penances, silence, and gift of prayer (the latter said to have been communicated to her at twelve years of age), read suspiciously like simple assumptions made by her biographers, and in any case do not help to individualize her, in these years of uncertain, tentative, or as yet but little characteristic, forms of goodness.
But from thirteen, for three years onwards, the young girl is very certainly and deeply drawn to the Conventual life, as she sees it practised by her sister Limbania, who, true to the example of her own Genoese Augustinian Patron Saint, had become a member of the Augustinian Canonesses of our Lady of Graces, and now lived there happy and devoted in the midst of that very fervent and cultivated Community. Limbania was one of the nineteen Foundresses of this Convent, who, on August 5, 1451, received the habit of Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, from the hands of Padre Giovanni de’ Gatti, at that time Superior of S. Teodoro outside the walls of Genoa, a house of the same Order. Among these Novices occur a Simonetta di Negro, no doubt a cousin of Catherine, and Nicola and Lucia da Nove, two sisters; these facts will have helped Catherine to hope for admission together with her own sister Limbania.[45]
The Convent and its Chapel, both secularized, are still in existence, at a quarter of an hour’s walk from Catherine’s palace-home. Moving from here, along the Vico Chiabrera, up the Via dei Maruffi (now San Bernardo), and across the latter, up one of the many steep, very narrow little alleys, to the Piazza dei Embriaci, and again up by the tall, slim, grey tower of the Crusader Guilielmo Embriaco, we arrive at last at a level, all but deserted, sun-baked piazza, called, after its Church, Sta Maria in Passione. Face this Church, and the long, tall house on your left hand, covered with dim, faded frescoes, is Limbania’s Convent, so loved by Catherine. The right door leads into the Chapel, which Vallebona[46] found in 1887 in use as a wood-store, and which I saw in May 1900 turned into a music-hall: where the altar had stood, were a dingy stage, and tawdry wings. The pompous frescoes and stuccos on the walls and ceiling are evidently of the seventeenth century or even later. The adjoining Convent still retains a small figure of St. Augustine sculptured on a corbel on the vault of the first landing. The Byzantine, dark brown Madonna-and-Child picture, which Catherine so often prayed before in the Chapel, can still be seen, on the left-hand wall of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Church of S. Maria di Castello, which is close by, at a lower level than the Piazza of the Convent.
4. Catherine’s marriage. The Adorni family.
The Convent Chaplain was Catherine’s Confessor, and through him she attempted to gain the permission of the Nuns to enter their Community. But whilst they hesitated and put her off, on the very reasonable ground of her unusual youth, her father died (end of 1461); and a particular combination, from amongst the endless political rivalries and intrigues of Genoa, soon closed in upon the beautiful girl, member of the greatest of the Guelph families of that turbulent time. It was a bad and sorry business, and one likes to think that the father, had he lived, would not thus have sacrificed his daughter. For if in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we have two youthful lovers joining hands and hearts, in spite of the secular enmity of their respective houses; here, alas! in real life, we have the contrary spectacle, the deep because dreary tragedy of two great rival factions making—rather, hoping to make—peace, by the enforced union of two mutually indifferent and profoundly unsuited young people.
Not but that socially the two were admirably matched. For Giuliano Adorno belonged to a family hardly inferior in antiquity and splendour to Catherine’s own. Six different Adorni had been Doges of Genoa in 1363, 1385, 1413, 1443, 1447, 1461; and the one of 1413 had been Giuliano’s own grandfather. They were Lords of the Greek Island of Chios (Scio), which they had helped to conquer for Genoa in 1349.