The rest of the story has Maxentius calling in a squad of philosophers to dispute with St. Catherine and lead her to apostasy, but the saint instead converts them. Maxentius orders her to be starved in prison for 12 days, but a dove brings her food from Heaven. Then the emperor's wife and 200 knights visit her, and she converts them too. In a fury, Maxentius orders that she be tortured on a device featuring four spiked wheels, but angels are sent to destroy it. At last, he has her beheaded.
The Golden Legend has a rather confused account of how the wheeled device operated, and this confusion carries into the images of St. Catherine's passion. Portraits of the saint usually show her with the ruined wheel, the sword used to behead her, and the palm branch of martyrdom, as in the painting by Caravaggio (ca. 1598. Oil on canvas, 173 x 133 cm, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid).
Because the Legend says St. Catherine was a queen, she also usually wears a crown. Indeed, because she was the only queen among the martyrs of Roman times many images rely on just the crown and the palm branch, sometimes with a book. The book presumably refers to St. Catherine's erudition "in the arts liberal, wherein she drank plenteously of the well of wisdom, for she was chosen to be a teacher and informer of everlasting wisdom" (Caxton's translation of the Legend).
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