Catherine of Siena, saint and stateswoman

On the walls of the papal Sala Regia in Rome, just across from a rather gruesome depiction of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572) by Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Artists, you can find another fresco, also by Vasari, on an unusual theme: Pope Gregory XI’s return to Rome after the papacy’s long exile in Avignon (1309-76). In this flamboyant mannerist re-imagining, Gregory is surrounded by a throng of soldiers, nymphs and miniature cherubs. Behind him and to the left – separate, somehow, from the carnivalesque onlookers – stands a woman, pointing the way onward. This is Catherine of Siena, who is credited in Catholic tradition with persuading Gregory to return to Italy. Though usually remembered as a saint and mystic, Catherine was also one of the most politically influential women of the early Italian Renaissance.

Catherine was canonised in 1461, and the Roman Catholic Church celebrates her feast day on 29 April, the anniversary of her death aged 33 in 1380. In the intervening 646 years, Catherine has been a regular fixture of Catholic art. Vasari’s is not the classic image; much better known than the Avignon story is that of her mystical marriage to Christ, an episode reported by her confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua. In her letters, Catherine memorably asserted that Jesus wed all his true followers ‘not with a ring of silver, but with the ring of His Flesh’. It was a metaphor, but this would not stop later critics imagining Catherine adorned with a literal foreskin ring.

Catherine’s mystical marriage became a popular artistic subject because it encouraged parallels to her revered fourth-century namesake, Catherine of Alexandria. Vasari also painted a version of her marriage, preserved at the Hermitage. His Sala Regia painting of the Sienese Catherine, however, is doing something different – and more interesting. It presents us with Catherine the envoy and advisor to the Pope. Unlike the miniature cherubs, this was not just a flight of Vasarian fancy. From a young age, Catherine expressed a wish to lead a celibate life, but she was as vehemently opposed to joining a nunnery as to marriage. Instead, she was received into the mantellate – a group of lay women, usually widows, dedicated to the Dominican Order – which allowed her unusual freedom of manoeuvre. She travelled widely, writing letters to powerful contemporaries such as Bernabò Visconti, Lord of Milan, and Sir John Hawkwood, the formidable English condottiere (mercenary captain) immortalised by Paolo Uccello in the Florentine Duomo. In both her native Tuscany and in Avignon, Catherine carved out a prominent political role.

The city states of late medieval Italy retain a glamorous place in the history of ideas. They represent the birth of the Renaissance, just as the coffee houses of 18th-century London and Paris represent the birth of the Enlightenment. Florence and Siena enjoyed forms of republican self-government, which bear at least a passing resemblance to modern democracies, as a wider mercantile elite debated politics and competed for power. In the 1920s, when the German-Jewish historian Hans Baron sought a past example of a participatory public sphere to help him build a defence of Weimar Germany, it is not surprising that he turned to Italy at the turn of the 15th century. Though the specifics of Baron’s account have been challenged, his insistence that there is something special about the political life of the city remains instructive. In the Italian city state, politics was up-close and personal.

Catherine is not often associated with the political thought of 14th-century Italy, but she cut an influential figure. When the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati – a hero of Baron’s account – was making his name by writing public letters to persuade other Tuscan cities to ally with Florence in the War of the Eight Saints (1375-78), Catherine was writing letters to persuade them to join the other side, united behind the Pope. Catherine and the early Florentine humanists were part of the same cultural and political world.

Catherine’s writings about city life revolve around the concept of carità (and its Latin equivalent caritas), which can be roughly translated as ‘love’ or ‘charity’, but here particularly signifies the love of God. Acts of carità involved exercising a love of one’s neighbour or oneself in a manner ultimately oriented towards the greater glory of God. Throughout her works, Catherine deployed the language of carità to present the love of one’s neighbour – which, in a civic context, meant fellow citizen – as a divine duty. On this understanding, the truly religious life was not one of pure contemplation; it also involved participation in the active life of the city.

Acting with carità meant putting aside one’s own interests to achieve the greater goal of civic harmony. This was a language with a rich rhetorical potential in cramped cities, in which opposing political factions lived side-by-side. Civic disturbance was always a risk, and it was commonplace for one faction to forcibly expel another, seizing their property in the process. The most famous example is the conflict between the White and Black Guelfs, which drove Dante out of Florence. Expulsions and seizures rarely solved problems for long; exiled factions would set up camp near the city, waiting for the chance for readmission and – perhaps – violent revenge. Even when violence was avoided, legal wrangling over the true owner of disputed property could drag on for years. Those with experience of such acrimony knew that goodwill over and above the level of the bare legal minimum was often needed to end such disturbances. Catherine was one of those who developed the language of carità as a political alternative.

Catherine’s insistence that civic life needed to be driven by carità also contrasted with the ideas of virtuous poverty being put forward by the friars of the Franciscan Order. For Franciscan writers, spiritual purity was best achieved by absolute poverty, in a complete abnegation of the physical world. But for Catherine, the physical – and thus the political – world mattered. You could not reject and ignore questions of property, jurisdiction and rule. But you could (and should) do your best to exercise your rights well – that is to say, with charity.

Living out her participatory ideals, Catherine addressed the major controversies of her day in her correspondence: as well as backing the papacy against Florence in the War of the Eight Saints, she favoured the Italian choice against the French in the disputed papal elections of 1378. Her surviving works include 300 letters and a book known as Il Dialogo della Divina Providenza, an imagined dialogue with God. In this work – the fullest statement of her thought – Catherine adapted ideas from the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas for a broader, civic audience. Catherine’s God asserts that he has ‘distributed [all the virtues] in such a way that no one person has all of them’, thus necessitating that all citizens exercise their own virtues for each other’s benefit. As Catherine sums up, ‘every virtue and every vice is put into action by means of your neighbours’.

Catherine’s writings became a prominent part of her iconography. In a widely admired altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini, formerly housed at Venice’s Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo (but destroyed by a fire in 1867), Catherine was paired with Aquinas, both holding their books. Other examples include the depiction of Catherine being canonised by the Sienese pope, Pius II, featured in the fresco cycle in the Sienese Duomo’s Piccolomini Library painted by Pinturicchio (with the assistance of Raphael) between 1502 and 1507. Here, a book – perhaps the Dialogo – rests on her miraculously preserved body. The book cements a symbolic bond between Catherine and Pius, a ‘humanist’ pope celebrated for his literary interests and talent.

Catherine’s works retained their popularity into the age of print. In 1500, the pioneering Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published an edition of Catherine’s correspondence, which included a full-page woodcut portrait. The Aldine Catherine carries a book containing the words ‘iesu dolce, iesu amore’, a sign-off she used regularly, in italics. This was not only a clever visual pun, giving the appearance of Catherine holding a handwritten volume of letters; it was also the very first use of italic type in print history.

The most powerful figure with whom Catherine corresponded was Pope Gregory himself. She addressed him, with childlike intimacy, as ‘babbo’ (‘daddy’ or ‘papa’). When her letters urging Gregory to return to Italy did not have the desired effect, Catherine travelled to Avignon to make her case in person. For Edward Gibbon, the idea of Catherine, ‘the spouse of Christ’, being a factor in Gregory’s return was a rich source of comedy: marvelling at the irony of ‘the popes themselves, the great masters of human credulity’ listening to ‘visionary females’, he expressed his disappointment at ‘not [having] leisure to expatiate’ further on Catherine’s life, ‘which might furnish some amusing stories’ (the legend of the foreskin ring looms). Yet for the papacy, Vasari’s symbolic depiction of Catherine’s persuasive powers remained worthy of conspicuous display. The return to Rome – and escape from an interfering French monarchy – was a moment of papal triumph.

Catherine’s life furnished inspiration to later Catholic women, especially those of the Dominican Order. The artistic works of the Florentine Dominican nun, Plautilla Nelli (1524-88), whose works were restored in recent times by Advancing Women Artists, capture this side of Catherine’s legacy. Nelli painted a vast Last Supper for the refectory of the Order’s Florentine convent, which was named for Catherine. Though the convent was later destroyed, Nelli’s Last Supper survives, displayed at the Museo Santa Maria Novella. For many years, this was one of only three works attributed to Nelli. But, in 2017, an exhibition at the Uffizi – the gallery’s first to focus solely on a woman – made the case that Nelli also painted several sharp, clear portraits of Catherine. These include an intimate portrait of Catherine contemplating the cross and a vivid depiction of Catherine mid-prayer. It seems eminently plausible – and fitting – that Nelli should be the artist behind these intense, personal works depicting her convent’s patron saint. In Nelli’s paintings, we glimpse another remarkable example of the female Renaissance experience. They are an apt tribute to Catherine’s extraordinary life.