Saint Cecilia
22 November · Memorial · Red
Cecilia keeps her eyes on the keys of a small organ, and an angel holds the sheet of music up for her and watches her play. The canvas is the work of two hands, Orazio Gentileschi's and, the National Gallery of Art records, Giovanni Lanfranco's; the music on the sheet has never been identified. Her Acts say that while the instruments played at her wedding she sang in her heart to the Lord alone. The angel holds the page; the song is hers.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1961.9.73 (Diane De Grazia, systematic catalogue entry)
Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Lanfranco
c. 1617/1618 and c. 1621/1627, National Gallery of Art, Washington
About this painting
Her life
When Cecilia suffered is not known, and her Acts are, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a pious romance; but the martyrs are historical. The story tells that she was given in marriage to a noble pagan youth, Valerianus, and told him that an angel guarded her virginity; he went to the pope, was baptised, and came back a Christian, and his brother Tiburtius followed him. The executioner let his sword fall three times without severing her head, and she lived three days more. She was buried among the bishops in the catacomb of Callistus, and her church in Trastevere was built as early as the fourth century.
Pope Paschal I moved her relics there in the ninth century, and in 1599, when Cardinal Sfondrato restored the church, her tomb was opened again. Five different Masses in her honour are already in the Leonine Sacramentary. She became the patron of music, the Catholic Encyclopedia suggests, through a line of her Acts used in her Office: while the instruments played at her wedding, she sang in her heart to the Lord alone. Rome's academy of music took her as its patroness in 1584. The music that stays is the kind sung in the heart to the Lord alone, and it is the one kind any of us can still keep.
Johann Peter Kirsch, “St. Cecilia”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908): newadvent.org
In Scripture
80Let my heart be undefiled in thy justifications, that I may not be confounded.
Psalms 118:80, Douay-Rheims (Challoner). The verse her Acts say she sang in her heart (Psalm 119:80 in the Hebrew numbering).
In painting
Raphael
c. 1514–1516, panel transferred to canvas, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, inv. 577
The holding institution's record
In Raphael's altarpiece Cecilia stands among four saints with a small organ slipping from her hands, its pipes coming loose, and looks up to where six angels sing from open books on a cloud. On the ground at her feet lie the instruments of this world, a viol, a drum, cymbals, put down. He painted it for a chapel in Bologna, and the Pinacoteca reads it as earthly music given up for the music of heaven. Saint Paul leans on his sword, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Augustine turn to each other, and Saint Mary Magdalen looks out at us (Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, inv. 577).
The day in the next three years
| 2026 | Sunday 22 November: not kept this year; it is the Solemnity of Christ the King. |
|---|---|
| 2027 | Monday 22 November |
| 2028 | Wednesday 22 November |
Near this day
The saints of the year · The feasts · The Rosary
Written and checked by the Monstrance editors; sources cited. Scripture in the Douay-Rheims (Challoner). Every painting is in the public domain, and each caption follows the record of the institution that holds it.
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