Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Ercole de' Roberti was the youngest and most innovative of the three great Ferrarese painters of the fifteenth century — alongside Tura and Cossa — and his Saint Catherine of Alexandria from around 1470 is an early work showing his style in formation before the mature masterpieces of the 1480s. Catherine — the learned virgin martyr who debated pagan philosophers and was condemned to death on a spiked wheel — was among the most popular female saints in Renaissance Italy, and her image circulated in every format from large altarpieces to small devotional panels. Ercole had studied under Cossa after Cossa's departure from Ferrara to Bologna, and this early Catherine shows Cossa's influence in the precise, calligraphic line quality and the figure's spatial assertiveness — qualities that Ercole would develop into his distinctive nervous, hyperintense mature style.

The young Ercole de' Roberti handles the saint's figure with the linear precision he inherited from his Ferrarese training: contours are sharply defined, and the modelling within those contours is achieved through careful tonal layering. Catherine's wheel attribute — the instrument of her intended martyrdom, broken by divine intervention before her execution — is rendered with attention to its physical construction. The saint's book of learning identifies her intellectual martyrdom as well as her physical one.