No one has ever told the story of Saint Catherine of Siena as truthfully as her own Letters tell it. She is more realistic in those pages of her own composition than within the compass of all the varied ‘Lives,’ from Di Capua’s to the most recent and beautiful one by Johannes Joergensen. It is said that the Sienese artists were never so truly inspired as when they painted her, but it is in the art as in the literature around her name : a succession of glimpses. Andrea di Vanni, her contemporary and a pupil in her school of mysticism, has left us one genuine likeness of her m his famous portrait: pallid oval face, long nose, mouth and chin which give some hint of her sheer courage and resolution, dark eyes with the abstracted expression of one who is solely concerned with the internal reality behind ‘the terrible doubt of appearances.’ So, remote and unresponsive, she probably looked when people crowded round her to kiss her hand; a fashion for which she was severely criticized, and which she defended by saying (somewhat wearily, perhaps) that she simply didn’t see how persons greeted her, she was so interested in them. Passing on to Bazzi’s really exquisite ‘Svenimento,’ this, too, probably represents her as she was in that moment of mystery of the Stigmatization: but through the whole gallery of frescoes and pictures, down to those of the sixteenth century, which depict her with the simper of a debutante, the real Catherine is not seized anywhere. Of necessity, the artists have failed more signally than the hagiographers and essayists.