Jaume Cascalls was a painter and architect, and also one of the most important and influential sculptors working in Catalonia in the fourteenth century. Cascalls was familiar with contemporary French and Italian styles, and introduced a distinctively graceful Gothic manner to Spanish art. This sculpture shows St Catherine of Alexandria holding her attribute, the wheel upon which she was broken, and a heavily corrugated palm frond characteristic of Cascalls’s painted and sculpted martyrs. The statue comes from the twelfth-century Cistercian convent of Santa Maria de Vallbon, and probably once occupied a niche. Its surface shows traces of original paint and gilding.