Thursday, November 25, 2004

Melchiore Caffa's The Assumption of Saint Catharine



Here's a marble sculpture for a change. You can see another picture of it at this online iconography webmuseum. According to one St. Catharine legend, after her death her body was born off to Mount Sinai by angels, which is depicted here. The bones were later discovered and a monastery was built in the reign of Justinian to house them. You can explore the monastery online. Fittingly, given its patron saint, the library of St. Catherine's is the largest collection of Christian manuscripts outside the Vatican; the Codex Sinaiticus, an important fourth-century manuscript for Biblical scholars, was discovered there.