Catherine of Siena’s chest stigma: ambiguities between the textual and visual traditions

Abstract

After the Early Christian period, the practice of depicting Christ’s chest stigma on the right-hand side of his upper torso was an established component of stigmata iconography. Thereafter, this tradition was consistently followed in painted images of stigmatic saints—most notably in representations of St Francis of Assisi. St Catherine of Siena (1357–80) also bore the stigmata, and when her chest stigma was included in her portraits the conventional pictorial tradition continued and artists placed the wound on the right side of her chest. Plautilla Nelli (1524–88), a Dominican prioress and painter in Florence, however, introduced a new iconography. Contrary to all visual precedents, she painted several small works depicting Catherine with a bloody chest stigma on her left-hand side. The suggestion offered here is that Nelli’s unorthodox and original iconography was indebted not to the visual tradition but to two near-contemporary textual sources for Catherine’s stigmatization. Raymond of Capua’s Legenda maior and Thommaso Caffarini’s Libellus de supplemento report Catherine’s own account of her imprinting in which she testifies that the ray to her chest came to her left side, the side of her heart.