Estigmatización de Santa Catalina de Siena (copia)

Dated to 1862 and in the Museo del Prado, this canvas of the Stigmatisation of Saint Catherine of Siena is identified as a copy — an important distinction that contextualises it as a professional exercise rather than an original composition. Making high-quality copies of major religious paintings was a standard part of academic training and a financially viable professional activity in the nineteenth century: churches, religious institutions, and private collectors regularly commissioned copies of altarpieces and devotional paintings they could not acquire directly. Rosales was in Rome in 1862, and the work's subject and Italian religious iconography suggest a copy after an Italian original — possibly a Counter-Reformation altarpiece from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Saint Catherine of Siena, the Dominican mystic who received the stigmata in a vision, was a major subject of Italian religious painting, particularly in Sienese and Dominican artistic traditions.

A copy demands fidelity to the original's composition, colour, and technique — creative latitude is subordinated to faithful transcription. Rosales's copy would have required him to match the tonal system and brushwork conventions of the Italian original, providing both a lesson in historical technique and a test of his ability to suppress his own painterly instincts in favour of another artist's manner.