Raffaello Sanzio - Le martyre de Sainte-Cécile

Raphael's Saint Cecilia, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, was commissioned in 1513–16 for the Capella Bevilacqua in San Giovanni in Monte. This catalogue entry, titled 'Le martyre de Sainte-Cécile' and dated c.1600, likely refers to a seventeenth-century copy of the altarpiece rather than the original, which never left Bologna. Raphael's composition — the saint standing surrounded by Saints Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene, gazing up toward a choir of angels — was one of the most copied religious compositions of the Renaissance. Copies circulated across Catholic Europe as devotional objects and as models for artists.

Copies of the Saint Cecilia altarpiece reproduce Raphael's characteristic cool, clear palette and the stately arrangement of five figures in shallow space. Cecilia holds broken musical instruments at her feet while a celestial music sounds above — the contrast between earthly and heavenly music given visual form.