Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, dated to around 1620 and held at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, was painted toward the end of Vouet's early Roman period when his style was transitioning from strong Caravaggesque influence toward a more classicising approach. Catherine of Alexandria — the learned philosopher-saint who confounded the arguments of fifty pagan scholars before her martyrdom by the breaking wheel — was among the most popular female saints in Catholic devotional culture, her combination of intellectual distinction and physical beauty making her a natural subject for refined patrons. Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art, designed by Le Corbusier and holding one of Asia's finest collections of European painting, acquired this canvas as representative of Italian-French Baroque figure painting. The wheel, Catherine's attribute, was the instrument of a torture that miraculously shattered, resulting in her eventual beheading — a detail that lent her imagery a visual drama exploited by Baroque painters. Vouet's Catherine is likely shown in three-quarter format with the broken wheel as attribute, combining the conventions of portraiture and sacred figure painting.

The broken wheel — Catherine's primary attribute — is typically integrated into the composition as both iconographic identifier and diagonal compositional element. Vouet's treatment of Catherine's features in this transitional period balances the Caravaggesque interest in individualised physiognomy against the idealising tendency that would come to dominate his later work. The palette begins to lighten from the dark grounds of his earliest paintings.