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.

摘要

在早期基督教时期之后，在他的上半身右侧描绘基督的胸部柱头的做法是柱头图像的一个既定组成部分。此后，这一传统在圣徒的绘画图像中一直被遵循——最引人注目的是阿西西圣弗朗西斯的描绘。锡耶纳的圣凯瑟琳 (1357–80) 也有圣痕，当她的肖像中包含她的胸部圣痕时，传统的绘画传统继续存在，艺术家将伤口放在她胸部的右侧。然而，佛罗伦萨的多米尼加女修道院院长兼画家普劳蒂拉·内利 (Plautilla Nelli)（1524-88 年）介绍了一种新的肖像画。与所有视觉先例相反，她画了几幅小作品，描绘了凯瑟琳的左手胸部有血迹。这里提供的建议是，内利的非正统和原始图像不是归功于视觉传统，而是归功于凯瑟琳污名化的两个近现代文本来源。卡普阿的雷蒙德Legenda maior和 Thommaso Caffarini 的Libellus desupplemento报告了凯瑟琳自己对她的印记的描述，她在其中作证说照射到她胸部的光线到达了她的左侧，也就是她的心脏一侧。