This etched copperplate—unusually preserved here with an otherwise unrecorded contemporary print pulled directly from it—depicts the body of the virgin-martyr St. Gaudenzia as she was displayed in the convent of Capuchin nuns at San Giovanni in Bagnacavallo near Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. The plate was etched by Vincenzo Marabini (1774-1847), very likely shortly after the arrival of the body of Gaudenzia.

Marabini is known from a handful of devotional prints, but none following the format seen here. The inscription of the print is fictive, made to look like an epigraphic inscription on the monument but in fact describing the print itself: “Image of the Virgin and Martyr Saint Gaudenzia, drawn and etched [exculpta] from the prototype, which in the interior chapel of the Capuchin nuns of Bagnacavallo is most religiously tended and venerated.”

The body of Gaudenzia remains at Bagnacavallo to the present day. This engraving appears to be a unique survival, as no other early prints of the Gaudenzia body/shrine have been forthcoming. The print was likely mounted to card and preserved with the plate to serve as an easy reference for visualizing the plate’s design, a common practice in the preservation and storage of such plates.

A saint of rather dubious attestation, Gaudenzia was “rediscovered” in 1796 in the Catacombs of Ciriaca in Rome near San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, and shortly thereafter her body was transferred to the convent at Bagnacavallo. Gaudenzia ranks among the very last early Christian saints to be discovered in the monumental archaeological explorations of the ancient Roman catacombs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

San Giovanni, a Camaldolese house during the eighteenth century, was closed following to the destructive suppression of religious orders during the Napoleonic period. In 1816, it was reoccupied by Capuchin nuns who ran the convent as a boarding school for the girls of local and regional aristocrats and landed gentry. The house is perhaps most (in)famous for being the school where Lord Byron sent his illegitimate daughter Allegra (1817-22), who tragically died there at five years of age.