Note 294 — Chapter VII · CATHERINE’S REMAINS AND CULTUS; THE FATE OF HER TWO PRIEST FRIENDS AND OF HER DOMESTICS; AND THE REMAINING HISTORY OF ETTORE VERNAZZA

Vita, p. 164b. This first coffin is still extant: it stands now, empty in a glass case, in the smaller of the two rooms shown in the Hospital as her last dwelling-place. Twice over the Vita talks of a “deposito,” although directly only in connection with its opening “about eighteen months later,” i.e. not before March 1512. Now Argentina del Sale declares, in a Will of the year 1522 (a copy, in Giovo’s handwriting, exists in the volume of the Biblioteca della Missione), that she desires to be buried “in the Church of the Annunciata, in the monument of the late Giuliano Adorno.” Thus Giuliano’s grave was still generally known and fully accessible twelve years after Catherine’s death; and it was a “monumento,” not a “deposito.” I have been completely baffled in all my attempts to trace the eventual fate of that monument, or even its precise site, or the precise date of its disappearance. I can but offer two alternative conjectures. (1) It stood in the choir-end of the Church. If so, it will have been covered up, promiscuously with many another vault and mortuary slab, when, in 1537, this end was cut off, for the purpose of widening the bastion which still runs behind it and above it, outside. (2) The “monument” was a slab on the floor of the nave or of some side-chapel. The present flooring of all the former, and of a large part of the Chapels, is relatively new; and it is (all but certainly) superimposed upon the old flooring or at least upon the old sepulchral slabs, since not one inscription remains visible in the nave. And if Giuliano’s “monument” lay there, it will still be extant, hidden away under the present flooring.—In either case it remains remarkable that the slight trouble was not taken to shift nave-wards, or to raise to the newer nave- or chapel-flooring, the “monument” of Catherine’s own husband. There are certainly monuments still visible in the Church older than 1497. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that some occasion was gladly seized for not moving or raising this monument, and for thus letting the saintly wife appear entirely alone in the Hospital Church, unattended by any memorial of her very imperfect husband.