Subject: Saint Barbara.
Author: Dosso Dossi (manner of), 17th century.
Technique and Dimensions: Oil on canvas; 238 x 164. Contemporary frame of the period
Rigorous perspective, chromatic richness, classicism, and monumental setting allow us to hypothesize an attribution of our painting to the workshop of Dosso Dossi, the main artist active at the Este court in Ferrara.
The early 17th-century painter of the work in question adopts and re-elaborates some fundamental acquisitions of Dossi, primarily chromatism and landscape investigation, also providing interesting points of contact with the best experience of the 17th-century Bolognese school, whose classicism the work is imbued with.
Direct points of contact with Dossi's religious production, especially regarding the chromatic aspect and the attention paid to the sacred figure portrayed, always placed on the foreground, can be found in specular parallels with Saint Julian (Hampton Court, Royal Collection), Saint George (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), Saint Lucretia (National Gallery of Art in Washington).
For the landscape aspect, the Dossi-esque apparition of the Madonna and Child to the Confraternity of the Snow between Saints Francis and Bernardino is worth remembering.
We are in the presence of a language, that of Dossi, constantly updated with the latest news from the nerve centers of the peninsula thanks to his frequent travels (Florence, Rome and Venice), a language also nourished by the fruitful dialogue with Titian: a certain parallelism can be seen between the paganizing pose of our Saint (implicit the figurative reference to a pagan image of Sibyl or Vestal) with the slightly exposed breast and the Lucretia of the "Suicide of Lucretia" of works matured in the Venetian pictorial climate: in our painting, as imposed by the hagiographic subject in question, the dagger has been replaced by the arrows.
Some biographical elements of the Saint Martyred by beheading by her own father (the pagan Dioscorus, who had her locked in a tower - depicted behind the saint in the right part of our painting - for having consecrated herself to Christ by choosing virginity rather than marrying a rich lord also of pagan faith) suggest, in fact, the parallel with further pagan mythical figures such as the mysterious "bona dea" , celebrated in Rome by women on December 4 after being flogged and killed by her father Fauno
As for the iconographic element of the arrows, held by the Saint in her left hand, are a further hagiographic reference (the oldest sources are Greek and place her martyrdom in Asia Minor in Nicomedia, one of the capitals of the Tetrarchy; other later ones are Latin and place it in Sabina in Scandriglia, near Rieti, which proudly claims the remains venerated in the cathedral): Dioscorus, after beheading his daughter, was immediately struck by lightning from the sky and all that remained of him was ash. Precisely in memory of this fact, after the discovery of gunpowder, the Saint became the patron saint of artillerymen (as well as firefighters, miners and pyrotechnicians).
To date, the word "santabarbara" is synonymous with powder keg, the place in barracks used as a depot for war ammunition. Despite her sweet virginal appearance, Barbara is, in fact, the lady of terrible things such as fire, lightning, and arrows.
In all likelihood, the building depicted in our painting in the lower left is a barracks, wanting to seal an authoritative tradition, figuratively confirmed, elsewhere, by the presence of the cannon at the foot of the Saint: eloquent, in this regard , is the late sixteenth-century painting by Giovanni Battista Moroni "The Virgin and Child in glory and Saints Barbara and Lawrence".
Last but not least, as an attestation to the iconographic fortune enjoyed by the subject in the pictorial field (remember Cosimo Rosselli's version at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence or Lucas Cranach the Elder's at the Gemaeldelgalerie in Dresden), the divine Raphael includes our Saint in one of the most famous paintings in the world, the Sistine Madonna (also in Dresden), in which the Saint appears together with Saint Sixtus at the foot of the Virgin, thus destining her portrait to everlasting fame.
