SANTA CECILIA || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Edward Burne-Jones (British painter and designer) 1833 - 1898
St. Cecilia, s.d.
Watercolour and bodycolour
57.8 x 163.2 cm (22.76" x 5' 4¼")
Private collection

Saint Cecilia was the first martyr whose body remains incorruptible. She has been regarded as patroness of church music. It is believed that she died in the year 177 A.D. According to church history, Cecilia was a maiden of noble birth. At an early age, she dedicated her life to God with a vow of chastity. But her family made her marry a young noble named Valerian. On her wedding day, she prayed to the Lord and asked Him to protect her virginity. History records, "The day on which the wedding was to be held arrived and while musical instruments were playing she was singing in her heart to God alone saying: Make my heart and my body pure that I may not be confounded" (McKinnon 46). St. Cecilia's prayers were answered, and Valerian was willing to take her as his wife without forcing her to break her vow. Not only did he accept her vow of chastity, he and his brother Tiburtius both converted to Christianity and were baptized by Pope Urban I.

At that time, Christianity was still illegal in Rome. Both Valerian and his brother Tiburtius were soon discovered to be Christians and were martyred. Cecilia was discovered soon after that and met a similar fate. It required two attempts before her executioners could kill her. They first locked her inside the bathroom of her own home and tried to suffocate her by steam. When she emerged from the bath unharmed, she was then beheaded. The stroke of the axe failed to sever her head completely from her body, however, and she
lingered on for three excruciating days. During that time, she saw to the disbursement of her assets to help the poor, and she donated her home to the ecclesiastical authorities to be used as a church.

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Edward Coley Burne-Jones, was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in Britain; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Martin's Church in Brampton, St Michael's Church, Brighton, Cumbria, the church designed by Philip Webb, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, Christ Church, Oxford and in St. Anne's Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands. Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice". In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.
In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration, most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer in 1896.