Life
Catherine came from an aristocratic Bolognese family, raised from the age of nine at the court of the Marquis Nicholas IV, Duke of Ferrara, whose ambassador was her father. In 1431 together with other young women of Ferrara, she founded a Monastery of the Order of Poor Clares.
She returned to Bologna in 1456 when her superiors and the governors of Bologna requested that she be the founder and Abbess of a monastery of the same Order, which was to be established in association with the Church of Corpus Domini. Catherine is the author, among other things, of Treatise on the 7 Spiritual Weapons Necessary for Spiritual Warfare. She was attributed with having visions both of God and of Satan, which are discussed at length in Treatise, and with performing miracles.
Some of her art and manuscripts survive, including a depiction of St. Ursula from 1456, now in the Galleria Academica in Venice. Some historians have called her style naif. That these works of Catherine de'Vigri remain existent might be due to their status as relics of a saint.
When she died at the age of 49, Catherine was buried and after eighteen days of alleged graveside miracles, her incorrupt body was exhumed and relocated to the chapel of the Poor Clares in Bologna, where it remains on display, dressed in her religious habit and seated upright behind glass.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Of Bologna
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)