It is somewhat bare to-day, painfully coated with modern paint and whitewash. It is hung with paintings representing scenes from her life and death, of little value from an artistic point of view, though one--that of her walking with her Master and Spouse--has a certain pathos and sweetness. Two narrow pictures over the entrance--representing her giving the cross of her rosary, and clothing the Divine Beggar with her robe--are earlier and better than the larger canvasses. But over the altar is a priceless treasure, the famous portrait of her by her friend and correspondent Andrea di Vanni, perhaps painted in her life-time and in any case her authentic likeness, in which the _mantellata_ is giving her hand to kiss to a kneeling follower of her own sex--in the way to which (when men were concerned) such exception was taken during her life. In the centre of the chapel a piece of the old pavement where she trode--walked with Christ, in the phrase of the legend--is religiously preserved. Elsewhere, marble tablets on the floor are marked with heart, cross or robe, and inscribed: "Christ changeth heart with Catherine"; "Catherine bestoweth her cross on Christ"; "Catherine clothes Christ with her robe." For into this chapel, as into others, the beggars came--and among them the disguised Spouse of her soul. Still may we see the pillar against which she leaned in her ecstasies--the pillar that is idealised in Bazzi's two frescoes on either side of the shrine below--though now it is covered and modernised like the rest of the chapel. An inscription hung upon it--a seventeenth century copy of one of much older date (but not earlier than her canonisation)--strikes the keynote of the whole chapel, and I will therefore translate it in full:-- "In this chapel, there befell many wonderful actions to St Catherine of Siena, among the which are those set down below, as the blessed Raimondo her confessor telleth, and they are also known by ancient tradition, besides the many others that befell in this present church. "Here she was clothed in the habit of St Dominic, and she was the first virgin who up to that time had been thus clothed. "Here she stayed apart to hear the divine offices, and here continually had she divine colloquies, conversing familiarly with Jesus Christ her Spouse. Here she said the divine office, she had frequent ecstasies, and for the most part in these she used to lean against this pilaster, in one of which ecstasies she was zealously portrayed by a painter on the wall outside of this chapel.[111] And from that time this pilaster has been, and still is formidable to the furies of Hell, and many persons possessed of devils have been delivered thereby. "Here she gave a little cross of silver, that she had threaded to her rosary, to Jesus Christ in the shape of a poor man, who afterwards told her that He would show it on the Day of Judgment to all the world.