The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria

c. 1593

Lodovico Carracci

Artist, Bolognese, 1555 - 1619

A young woman sleeps with her cheek resting on the back of one hand next to a woman holding a nude baby and two winged angels in this vertical painting. All the people have pale skin and they nearly fill the composition. The sleeping woman, Saint Catherine, rests her elbow on a stone table covered by a golden yellow cloth, which also wraps around her shoulders. Her knees are angled to our right and her face tips onto her hand to our left. Her curly, light brown hair is pulled back. She has delicately arching eyebrows, a straight nose, and her pink lips are closed. Her pale, olive-green, floor-length dress is tied at the waist with a mauve-purple sash. She wears a gold ring with a gray stone on the third finger of her left hand, which rests in her lap. To our right, the second woman, Mary, leans over Saint Catherine. Mary’s head is angled to our left, toward the sleeping saint, and she looks to our right, down past the baby. Mary’s complexion is has a faint gray cast, and her brown hair is covered by a white cloth, which is surrounded by a halo of light. A dark garment covers her shoulders over a scarlet-red dress. The baby sits on Mary’s lap with his body facing our left, toward Saint Catherine. He leans our way and looks at us with dark eyes. Light catches his brown curls and he has chubby cheeks, arms, and legs. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, a puff of gray cloud near the lower right corner seems to support Mary’s feet. A curving, charoal-gray spike in the lower left corner of the painting is partially covered by the yellow drapery. Behind Saint Catherine and over her head, next to Mary, are two winged angels with dark blond, curly hair. The angel closer to us rests one hand on the pine-green pillow behind Saint Catherine’s head and turns to look past Mary in profile, lips parted. The angel behind looks down with hands together in prayer. Light falls across the scene from our right. The upper right corner behind Mary is filled with brick-red clouds that, upon closer examination, are filled with faces looking onto the scene.

Media Options

This object’s media is free and in the public domain. Read our full Open Access policy for images.

We recognize this sleeping figure as Saint Catherine by the fragment of spiked wheel in the lower left corner, which was the instrument of an attempted martyrdom. Here Lodovico Carracci represented her legendary dream in which Mary and the infant Christ, accompanied by angels, appeared to her. Plighting his troth, Christ placed a ring on Catherine's finger, and through this mystic marriage she became his bride. To cast the event as a dream, rather than having Saint Catherine receive the ring while awake, is Lodovico's innovation.

Two angels at the left look on with protective tenderness, while others barely emerge amid the vaporous bronze radiance at the right -- spirit becoming matter. The figures, solid and robust, bask in an indeterminate setting. A languorous warmth pervades the scene and slows the composition. At the same time, the quirky folds and pleats cascading down Catherine's garments impart a vertiginous sensation -- the dizziness of sleep.

Lodovico was the eldest of the three Carracci, the family of Bolognese artists who inaugurated the age of the baroque. His depictions of saints in states of visionary ecstasy were highly prized in an age when the purpose of religious art was to arouse intensely pious emotions in the spectator.

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, which is available as a free PDF https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/italian-paintings-17th-and-18th-centuries.pdf

Not on view See artworks now on view

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 138.8 x 110.5 cm (54 5/8 x 43 1/2 in.)
    framed: 181 x 149.9 x 11.4 cm (71 1/4 x 59 x 4 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    1952.5.59

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Louis-Jacques-Aimé-Theodore de Dreux, marquis de Nancré [d.1719]; who probably gave it to Philippe II, duc d'Orléans [1674-1723];[1] Louis, duc d'Orléans [1703-1752];[2] by inheritance to his grandson, Louis-Philippe-Joseph [Philippe Egalité, 1747-1793];[3] sold 1792 to viscount Edouard de Walkuers; sold to François-Louis-Joseph, marquis de Laborde-Méréville [d. 1801], who took it to London;[4] bought at (Jeremiah Harman's London)[5] by a consortium consisting of Francis Egerton, 3d duke of Bridgewater [1736-1803], Frederick Howard, 5th earl of Carlisle and the earl Gower; retained by Francis Egerton, 3d duke of Bridgewater, upon whose death it entered a trust held in succession by the following: George Granville Leveson-Gower, 2d marquess of Stafford and 1st duke of Sutherland [1758-1833], nephew of preceding; Francis Egerton, 1st earl of Ellesmere [1800-1857], son of preceding; Francis Charles Granville Egerton, 3d earl of Ellesmere [1847-1914], grandson of preceding who inherited the trust in 1903;[6] by descent to John Sutherland, 5th earl of Ellesmere and duke of Sutherland; (his sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 18 October 1946, no. 67); bought by (Hans Callmann).[7] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Florence); purchased 1950 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[8] gift 1952 to NGA.
[1] Casimir Stryiensky, La galerie du régent Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, Paris, 1913: 13, 167 no. 218. Nancré had accompanied the duke to Spain and was appointed Capitaine des Suisses at the Palais Royal. Stryiensky states that Nancré had given the painting to the duke out of gratitude for honors received. On Nancré see Edmond Bonnaffé, Dictionnaire des Amateurs français au XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1884 (reprinted Amsterdam, 1966): 229.
[2] Louis François Dubois de Saint-Gelais, Description des tableaux du Palais Royal, Paris, 1727: 298; this is the first documentation of the painting in the Orléans collection.
[3] Jacques Couché, La Galerie du Palais Royale, 2 vols., Paris, 1786-1808: 1:no. 5.
[4] William Buchanan, Memoirs of Painting, with a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England, London, 1824: 1:17-18, 85. M. Passavant, Tour of a German Artist in England, 2 vols., London, 1836 (first German edition 1833): 2:179.
[5] A Catalogue of the Orléans Pictures, which will be exhibited for sale by private contract, on Wednesday the 26th of December, 1798 and following days at the Lyceum in the Strand, London, 1798: no. 184.
[6] The history of the trust is recounted in Lionel Cust, The Bridgewater Gallery, London, 1903: v-vii. The painting is recorded in the following catalogues: John Britton, Catalogue Raisonné of the Pictures Belonging to the Most Honourable Marquis of Stafford in the Gallery of Cleveland House, London, 1808, no. 25; Catalogue of Pictures Belonging to the Marquis of Stafford at Cleveland House, London, 1812, no. 25; William Young Ottley and Peltro William Tomkins, Engravings of the Most Noble the Marquis of Stafford's Collection of Pictures in London, London, 1818, no. 37, repro.; A Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures of the Most Noble the Marquess of Stafford at Cleveland House, London, 2 vols., London, 1825: 1: no. 33, pl. 10; Catalogue of the Bridgewater Collection of Pictures, Belonging to The Earl of Ellesmere at Bridgewater House, Cleveland Square, London, 1851: no. 48; and Gustav Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England, 3 vols., London, 1838: 2: 320.
[7] According to marginal notations in the copy of the auction catalogue held by the Getty Provenance Index.
[8] According to Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection, Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945-1951, Washington, D.C., 1951: 134. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2145.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1798

  • A Catalogue of the Orleans' Italian Pictures, The Lyceum in the Strand, London, 1798-1799, no. 184, as The Vision of St. Catharine.

1952

  • Opening Exhibition of The George Thomas Hunter Gallery of Art, Chattanooga Art Association, Tennessee, 1952, unnumbered.

1986

  • The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986-1987, no. 109, color repro.

1994

  • Ludovico Carracci, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Italy; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1993-1994, no. 33, repro. (shown only in Fort Worth).

1999

  • Caravaggio's 'The Taking of Christ': Saints and Sinners in Baroque Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1999, brochure, no. 6, repro.

2013

  • Il Sogno nel Rinascimento [Florence], La Renaissance et le rêve: Bosch, Véronèse, Greco... [Paris], Galleria Palatina--Palazzo Piti, Florence; Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 2013-2014, no. 37, repro.

2018

  • The Orléans Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, 2018-2019, no. 33, repro.

Bibliography

1939

  • Bodmer, Heinrich. Lodovico Carracci. Burgbei-Magdeburg, 1939: 43, no. 83.

1941

  • Arslan, Wart. Review of Heinrich Bodmer, Lodovico Carracci. Rivista d'Arte 23 (1941): 272, as by a painter between Annibale and Lodovico.

1951

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945-1951. Introduction by John Walker, text by William E. Suida. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1951: 134, no. 57, repro.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 213, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 24.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 17, repro.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 48.

1973

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century. London, 1973: 71-72, fig. 131.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 56, repro.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:123-124; 2:pl. 84.

1983

  • Freedberg, Sydney. Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983: 107.

1984

  • Feigenbaum, Gail. "Lodovico Carracci: A Study of His Later Career and a Catalogue of His Paintings." Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1984: 354-355, no. 97, fig. 129.

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 317, no. 415, color repro.

1985

  • Ferretti, Massimo. In Torquato Tasso. Exh. cat. Castello Estense and Casa Romei, Ferrara. Bologna, 1985: 250, 254, n. 6.

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 77, repro.

1988

  • Wheeler, Marion, ed. His Face---Images of Christ in Art, New York, 1988: 126, no. 18, color repro.

1992

  • National Gallery of Art, Washington. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 106, repro.

1993

  • Emiliani, Andrea, ed. Lodovico Carracci. Catalogue entries by Gail Feigenbaum. Exh. cat. Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio. Bologna, 1993: 70-72, no. 33.

1994

  • Schleier, Erich. Review of Andrea Emiliani, ed., Lodovico Carracci. Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 261-264.

  • Keazor, Henry. Review of Andrea Emiliani, ed., Lodovico Carracci. Kunstchronik 7 (1994): 358-363.

1996

  • De Grazia, Diane, and Eric Garberson, with Edgar Peters Bowron, Peter M. Lukehart, and Mitchell Merling. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 55-60, color repro. 57.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 159, no. 119, color repro.

Inscriptions

center left on book in Greek letters: Gospel of Christ

Wikidata ID

Q20176844

You may be interested in

Loading Results