Saints

About

Saints are recognised less by their faces than by what they hold. Catherine of Alexandria has her spiked wheel, Lucy carries her eyes on a dish, Sebastian is pierced with arrows and Jerome keeps a lion nearby. These attributes let worshippers identify a figure at a glance on altarpieces, in manuscripts and in stained glass.

Saints' lives also gave painters long narrative cycles. Vittore Carpaccio told the legend of Saint Ursula in a sequence of large canvases in the 1490s, and his Saint Augustine in His Study (c. 1502) captures the moment the scholar senses Jerome's death, while a small dog looks up. Andrea Mantegna's Saint Sebastian (c. 1456–59) binds the martyr to a ruined classical column. Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) lets a raking beam of light find a tax collector, and Francisco de Zurbarán painted Saint Francis kneeling in a dark cell, holding a skull.