Editor’s Note

Abstract

The cover for our fall issue features one of Europe’s patron saints at the beginning of her career, long before she had become a household name even in her native Siena. In a panel from what was once part of a predella by the Sienese artist Neroccio di Bartolomeo de’ Landi (1447–ca. 1500), the founders of three orders vie for the attention of the young Caterina Benincasa: Dominic, Francis, and Augustine (fig. 1). Coyly reaching around Augustine to hand Caterina the lily that represents the Dominican order, Saint Dominic is clearly the winner, and perhaps for good reason. The large family of the future saint lived in Fontebranda, just below the towering church of San Domenico, and Catherine would have spent her childhood watching the friars go in and out the nearby gate of Sant’Ansano. As Catherine’s confessor and hagiographer Raymond of Capua put it, at one point she tried to leave, too, in search of a hermitage—but was found out and forced to return home, where her insistence on a religious life was met with similar obstinacy on the part of her parents, who wanted her married. Neroccio’s small panel, like that of what may have been the adjacent scene of Catherine’s mystical marriage to Christ, gives us a rather spacious setting for this encounter with three saints. Caterina kneels on the colorfully tiled floor of a long and narrow chapel that houses an altar and an imposing wardrobe. Behind her opens an inviting loggia that seems to offer a quiet cortile, while the room itself is framed by large reddish pillars and a pediment. But Catherine’s encounter with her prospective mentors happened not in a convent, of which Neroccio’s architecture is reminiscent, but in her home, possibly in the small room where she had proposed to lock herself up as a way of resisting her parents’ demands—and more easily accessing the spiritual life she preferred. Caterina’s choice of the Dominican order nonetheless did not lead her to cloister herself as a nun but to take on themission of a tertiary, living