It is not for these things that we visit San Domenico to-day, but for the glorious chapel of St Catherine. Over it we read another of those hard sayings that sum up, mystically, the story of her inner life: "This chapel holds the head of Catherine. Dost thou seek her heart? Nay, that Christ bears inclosed in His breast." The shrine itself, over the altar, which contains this sacred relic--sacred, surely, to all lovers of the noblest things in the literature of mysticism no less than to Roman Catholics--is a work of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and is probably by Giovanni di Stefano. The frescoes on either side of it--representing the _Svenimento_, St Catherine fainting into the arms of her two attendant nuns, Alessia and Francesca, overcome by the glory of the vision of her celestial Bridegroom, and St Catherine miraculously fed with the Food of Angels in the Sacred Host--are by Bazzi, and were painted in 1526. Hardly elsewhere (save, perhaps, in the St Sebastian of the Uffizi painted in the previous year) has the wayward painter of Vercelli touched such a height of inspiration; in conception and execution alike, they are among the supreme triumphs of Italian art. The fresco on the left--representing the execution of Niccolò di Toldo, St Catherine ecstatically following the upward flight of the soul she has saved--is also Bazzi's, but less excellent. It is overcrowded and badly composed, carelessly executed in parts; the brawny figure and bearded head of the victim hardly suggest the delicate young nobleman, the _agnello_ of the _Leggenda minore_ whose blood has been unjustly shed;[110] but nothing could be more beautiful than the kneeling figure of the Saint herself. The beautiful pilasters between the frescoes, and the Angels and Prophets under the arch, are likewise Bazzi's. Bazzi left the work unfinished, and some fifty years after his death Francesco Vanni took [Illustration: _The Ecstasy of St. Catherine._ _Detail from Bazzi's Fresco._] it up, in 1593. By Vanni (who, of course, will not be confused with Andrea di Vanni, Catherine's contemporary and friend) is the picture on the right, painted in oil colours, where she is seen liberating a possessed woman from a demon; by him, too, are the figures of her two first biographers, the Blessed Raimondo da Capua and Frate Tommaso Nacci Caffarini, the authors of the _Leggenda_ and the _Leggenda minore_ respectively. Beautiful as the shrine is--and it would have been perfect in its harmony had only Bazzi completed the decorations--it is impossible at times not to feel that there is something more melodramatic in its treatment than quite accords with the simpler spirit of the dyer's daughter of Fontebranda. The _graffito_ work in coloured marble on the pavement represents Aesculapius among wild beasts. It is doubtful whether this is connected with the fact that several physicians of the Benzi family were buried in the chapel, or a part of the decorations in honour of the Saint.