Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata

Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata from 1450 by Giovanni di Paolo at the Metropolitan Museum depicts the moment when the Dominican saint received the wounds of Christ in a mystical experience. Catherine's stigmata was a controversial claim, and images like this served to validate the miracle. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays brilliant, jewel-like color, gold grounds, lyrical figure types of Gothic grace, perspectival experiments that create strange compressed spaces, intense narrative invention.

The mystical moment is rendered with visionary intensity, the divine rays connecting Christ to Catherine in a composition of characteristic angular drawing and rich Sienese coloring.