Saint Barbara

Around 1500 the city of Ulm, on the Danube in southern Germany, was one of the great workshops of the late Gothic world, turning out towering carved and painted altarpieces for churches across Swabia. Bartholomaus Zeitblom ran one of its busy painting shops, known for tall, calm, slightly elongated figures. A single saint like this Barbara would once have been a wing or panel of such an altar, seen by candlelight above an altar table. Barbara was remembered as a young woman locked in a tower by her own father for her Christian faith, and painters marked her out by that tower so worshippers would know her. Within a generation of Zeitblom's death the Reformation reached these towns, and many altarpieces like the one this panel came from were taken apart. The quiet, upright figure is what survived of a much larger structure.