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Caravaggio (1571-1610) was a near contemporary of Gesualdo (1560-1613). The painter and the musician had much in common. Both lived in a splendid era for the arts in Italy, at the heart of the baroque period, a time that brought together the counter-Reformation and licentiousness, mysticism and passion, beauty and violence. St. Catherine of Alexandria is one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces. It hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid and was painted in Rome around 1597 as the result of a commission from Cardinal Del Monte, seven years after Gesualdo had his wife and her lover killed. The saint appears as a beautiful girl, kneeling on a red pillow. At her feet is the palm branch of her martyrdom and behind her, the spiked wheel on which she died. In her hands she holds a sword. |
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