After crossing the entrance vestibule, you come into the oratory itself. Its appearance reflects the typical characteristics of a confraternity oratory: a single nave, with along the walls (except the back wall) wooden stalls dating to the sixteenth century, where the brothers would sit during assemblies. The seats against the entrance wall were generally reserved for the members who governed the Company.
The space is divided into three bays, covered by vaults decorated with late seventeenth-century stucco ornamentation which becomes richer close to the altar. This frames a heterogeneous series of paintings on various subjects and by artists who for the most part remain unknown, some on wooden panels and others on canvas. In some cases these are fragments of lost works, and all can be dated between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. The overall impression is of a disjointed collection mounted temporarily, awaiting a more suitable arrangement which never happened.
The subjects of the paintings placed along the walls are episodes from the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Saint Catherine. The entrance wall presents two eighteenth century canvases, one on the right and one on the left, showing respectively Jesus Appearing to Catherine in the Guise of a Poor Beggar, a fairly frequent theme in the iconography of the Saint, and Catherine Drinking from Christ’s Side the Blood of Redemption, the spirit’s ‘true nourishment’ and the bearer of salvation and eternal life. The large canvases on the side walls of the first bay illustrate, on the left, The Nativity of Jesus, and on the right, The Adoration of the Magi. In the next bay are The Birth of the Virgin, and the Dormition, both painted in the late seventeenth century.
In the third and last bay, Saint Catherine is the theme once again in two canvases, both painted in the eighteenth century. The one on the right shows The Beheading of Niccolò di Tuldo, a subject present also in the chapel dedicated to the Saint in the Basilica of San Domenico; it refers to an episode featuring a gentleman named Niccolò who, unjustly sentenced to death, fell into a state of profound desperation. In prison, he was visited by Saint Catherine, whose words, inspired by divine grace, comforted him to the point that he let himself be led to the scaffold “like a meek lamb.”
The scene on the left shows Catherine in Front of the Pope at Avignon, one of the most meaningful moments in her life, so important that it affected the fate of the papacy and of the Church. Thanks to her exhortations, the Pope returned to Rome, putting an end to the Avignon captivity which had lasted more than seventy years.
Below this painting, through a grille, you can see the small cell next to the oratory where Catherine would allow herself a few moments of rest on the bare stone during the long nights she spent caring for the sick in the hospital. In memory of this, a polychrome terracotta statue of Saint Catherine Sleeping has been placed in the cell. This work was long held to be by Vecchietta, but in reality it should be attributed to a more modest artist and a later period, probably in the seventeenth century.
The back wall of the oratory, a striking sight because of the great profusion of stucco decorations, holds the high altar where, under a canopy supported by four angels, Saints Dominic and Catherine adore a small marble sculpture of the Virgin and Child, a work by a northern artist of the late fourteenth century which, considering also the prominent position it occupies, may be the oldest devotional image belonging to the Company.
The visit concludes in the room adjacent to the sacristy, where a very beautiful gold-ground triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Andrew is mounted on the wall. By Taddeo di Bartolo, it is dated 1400. To its sides hang four head- and foot-boards of coffin stands showing Saint Catherine Protecting Four Confraternity Brothers with her Cloak, Saint Catherine with the Stigmata, and the Deposition and Resurrection of Christ. They were painted by a Sienese artist, probably Giacomo Pacchiarotti, in the early decades of the sixteenth century.