Right wing of a diptych: St. Katharina

This right wing of a diptych showing Saint Catherine, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, depicts the learned princess-martyr of Alexandria with her traditional attributes — the crown of her royal birth, the wheel of her attempted martyrdom, and the sword of her beheading. Rogier's workshop produced numerous devotional diptych wings combining saints with donor portraits for the wealthy patrons of the Burgundian Netherlands. Rogier van der Weyden combined exquisite emotional intensity with compositional clarity, making him the most influential Flemish painter of the mid-fifteenth century. The saint rendered with his characteristic clarity of line and jewel-like color, her crown and broken wheel establishing careful iconographic identity within an elegant compositional format, demonstrates the refined devotional production that made his workshop the most prestigious in northern Europe.

The saint is rendered with Rogier's characteristic clarity of line and jewel-like color. The precise rendering of her crown, book, and broken wheel establishes a careful iconographic identity within an elegant compositional format.