Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), St Cecilia with the Heads of Valerian and Tiburtius, Oil on canvas, 117 × 97 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from the Museums of Strada Nuova – Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Strozzi painted this picture in his early forties, in the years when his Genoese contemporaries still called him il Cappuccino. He had entered the Capuchin order around 1599 to 1600, taken full vows, and only obtained a partial release in 1610 to support his widowed mother and unmarried sister. Canonically he remained a friar. The painting belongs to the Genoese decade between that release and his flight to Venice in 1631, after the Capuchins had attempted to force him back into community life and briefly imprisoned him for refusing. The crimson brocade, the heavy silver of the platter, and the warm, rubensian flesh-tones all date the work to the early 1620s, when Genoese collecting was being recast by the long Flemish presence in the city: Rubens had visited in 1604 and 1606, and Van Dyck arrived in 1621 and stayed, with intermissions, until 1627.
Cecilia herself is on uncertain historical ground. The Passio Sanctae Caeciliae, composed in Rome in the late fifth century, supplied the narrative on which all later iconography depends, and the story reached Genoese readers above all through the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230 to 1298), Dominican Archbishop of Genoa from 1292.
Cecilia, vowed to virginity but married against her will to the Roman patrician Valerian, persuades her husband on their wedding night that an angel watches over her chastity. Valerian agrees to be baptised by Pope Urban I (r. 222 to 230) and returns to find an angel crowning the couple with garlands of roses and lilies. He converts his brother Tiburtius. The two occupy themselves with the burial of executed Christians, are denounced to the prefect Almachius, and are beheaded. Cecilia, sentenced first to suffocation in the overheated caldarium of her own house and then to the sword, is famously not killed cleanly: the executioner fails on three blows, and she lives three days more, dictating her household to the pope as a titulus church. The position of Maderno’s 1599 sculpture under the high altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, with the saint lying face-down and the cut visible at the base of her neck, fixed that detail in seventeenth-century devotional memory.
Strozzi compresses the whole story to a single confrontation. Cecilia stands three-quarter length behind a portative organ, in a heavy crimson and gold brocade. A blond putto twists beside her, raising a sackbut, the slide trumpet that Genoese church orchestras of the 1620s used to double the voices in concerted polyphony, so the instrument is not generic but a precise reference to the music actually heard in the city’s churches in Strozzi’s lifetime. Cecilia’s gaze rises towards a cleft of light at the upper right. Her hands rest on a wide silver platter heaped not with food but with the severed heads of Valerian and Tiburtius, the angel’s wreaths still circling their hair. The platter is no part of the Passio, which has the brothers buried decently; the iconographic shock of presenting their heads to the saint is a Counter-Reformation invention, and Strozzi’s is one of its earliest and most arresting forms.
For an early seventeenth-century Genoese viewer the platter would have carried specific local weight. The cathedral of San Lorenzo had since the late thirteenth century preserved the Sacro Catino, the green hexagonal dish brought back from Caesarea in 1101 by the Genoese fleet of the First Crusade and venerated for centuries as the vessel of the Last Supper, only revealed to be Egyptian glass when Napoleon broke it during its removal to Paris in 1809. The treasury also held the Discoperta, a chalcedony platter on which, by Genoese tradition, the head of John the Baptist was presented to Salome and Herod, paraded annually on the feast of the Baptist on 24 June. The platter on which Cecilia bears the two heads is therefore a direct visual citation of one of the most charged objects in the city’s sacred topography, folding the Roman martyrdom into a Genoese liturgical horizon.
The interpretive crux is the calmness of Cecilia’s face. Around the edges of the canvas the eye registers violence: severed flesh, disordered hair, the cooling weight of two human heads. At the centre, her expression is one of focused listening. Her right hand rests on the rim of the platter without strain. The discrepancy is the painting’s argument. The Counter-Reformation theology that endorsed the visceral display of martyrdom, codified in the decrees on sacred images at the closing session of the Council of Trent in December 1563 and developed by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane of 1582, also required the saint to be shown as already inhabiting the consolation her death secures. Cecilia hears the music we cannot hear, and what she carries weighs, for her, no more than the flowers still crowning her dead.
References
Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa (n.d.) Santa Cecilia con le teste di Valeriano e Tiburzio (catalogue entry, inv. PB 293). Available at: https://www.museidigenova.it/it/santa-cecilia-con-le-teste-di-valeriano-e-tiburzio (Accessed: 12 May 2025).
Voragine, J. de (c. 1260) Legenda Aurea. English trans.: Ryan, W. G. (trans.) (1993) The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press