St Barbara Being Led to the Tower

Around 1440, when this panel was painted, almost everyone who stood before it knew the story. Saint Barbara, the legend says, was the daughter of a pagan nobleman who shut her away in a tower, and there she became a Christian. The Belvedere records the painter only as an unknown master from Regensburg, the old trading city on the Danube. The men beside her wear turbans, tall hats and gold brocade, the dress that marked unbelievers in German painting of the time. Only Barbara has a halo. The tower itself rises at the edge of the scene, pale pink against a gold ground. The panel was once in a Swiss private collection that was sold at auction in Berlin in 1930. In December 1953 it was on show when the new Museum of Medieval Austrian Art opened in the Belvedere Orangery.