Saint Ursula

Francesco Ruschi trained in Rome, in the circle of Pietro da Cortona and the late heirs of Caravaggio, then carried that central-Italian manner north to Venice, where he settled as a young man in the 1620s. Around the middle of the century he painted this Saint Ursula, the British princess of legend killed with her companions at Cologne. You can name her by two things a viewer was meant to read at a glance: the arrow, the weapon of her martyrdom, and the long white banner that wraps almost around her as she lifts her eyes. The canvas hung in a Venetian convent, at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, until it came to the Accademia in 1865.