St. Cecilia was one of the four great Virgin saints of the Western church. Mrs. Anna Jameson devoted a chapter to her and her legend in “Sacred and Legendary Art”.
As she excelled in music, she turned her good gift to the glory of God, and composed hymns, which she sang herself with such ravishing sweetness that even the angels descended from heaven to listen to her, or to join their voices to hers. She played on all instruments, but none sufficed to breathe forth that flood of harmony with which her whole soul was filed: therefore she invented the organ, consecrating it to the service of God.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Jameson believed that only in the fifteenth century did artists begin to depict Cecilia with musical instruments. She rightly pointed out that the most famous version was Raphael’s version now in Bologna’s Pinacoteca Nazionale. In Raphael’s painting St. Cecilia stands in ecstasy among her cast-down instruments whose music bears no comparison with that of heaven. Despite her uplifted eyes, her sandals indicate that she is still of this world. Her heavenly onlookers are barefoot, a sign of their superior status.
St. John the Evangelist and St. Augustine are in the background but St. Paul and Mary Magdalen are figured much more prominently in the foreground. Fischel thought that they all were representations of love.
Fischel argued that the figure of St. Paul could not just be explained allegorically.
Fischel himself then began to wax rhapsodically.
At this point Mary Magdalen joins the group from the right, and invites the viewer to enter the scene.
There is a text that also linked St. Paul and Mary Magdalen in the popular imagination of the time. In the third volume of his classic work on Medieval iconography, Emile Male discussed a small book whose fame spread all over Europe during the fifteenth century. The book was the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying).
Raphael received the commission for the St. Cecilia in 1514. At the same time Titian was working on “The Sacred and Profane Love”. I have interpreted that famous and mysterious painting as “The Conversion of Mary Magdalen”, and argued that Titian included a depiction of the conversion of St. Paul on the centrally located antique relief.
*For a very thorough discussion see "Virgin Cults and Raphael's St. Cecilia" at the popular Art history blog, Three Pipe Problem.
**Anna Jameson: Sacred and Legendary Art, Vol. II, Boston, 1885. pp. 571-2.
***Oskar Fischel, Raphael, London, 1948, pp. 246-8.
#Emile Male, Religious Art in France, The Late Middle Ages, Princeton,1986, pp. 348-351.
Here is an image of San Giovanni in Monte supplied by David Orme. See comments for his note on the site in Bologna.
Here is David Orme's note on San Giovanni in Monte.
For me, it brings back memories of the church in which it was originally placed. I think I've spoken of the San Stefano complex in Bologna. This was looked on as a 'virtual pilgrimage', with the various locations in the complex representing different locations in Jerusalem. Once you've been round that, you head up a slight slope ('monte' is a considerable exaggeration!) to San Giovanni, which represented the final location, the Mount of Olives - indeed, tubs of olive trees stood outside the church while we were there. (pic attached) An ideal location for paintings suggesting the link between Heaven and Earth.
Thanks for the comment. In his study of Raphael Jean=Pierre Cuzin states that Elena commissioned the painting herself for her family chapel. Although she was canonized in the eighteenth century, it is hard for me to believe that she was promoting her own cause. Cuzin notes that a relative of Elena's, Antonio Pucci, worked to get Raphael to accept the commission. Pucci was one of the founding members of the confraternity of the Oratorio of Divine Love, a pre-Reformation renewal movement. It seems to me that Divine Love is the key to the painting.
The post at Three Pipe Problem linked above also discusses Elena.