Saint Ursula and the Virgins

Saint Ursula stands among her companions, the maidens who, in the medieval legend, sailed with a British princess on a pilgrimage to Rome and were killed at Cologne on the way home, their number swelling in the retelling to 11,000. The interesting thing here is the date. This picture was made around 1625 by someone working in the manner of Lucas Cranach the Younger, whose Saxon workshop had shut its doors decades before. So it is a follower keeping an older German style alive, its slim figures and pale faces already old-fashioned by the time the brush touched the canvas. The Cranach shop had turned out saints and Madonnas by the hundred, for Protestant and Catholic buyers alike, and this Ursula is a late echo of that production line. She holds the arrow that marks how she died, the one attribute the legend never let a painter leave out.