Santa Casilda

Zurbarán painted this in Seville in the 1630s, when he was the favourite supplier of saints and monks to the wealthy monasteries of southern Spain. His subject comes from a much older Spain. Casilda was said to be the daughter of a Muslim king of Toledo who secretly carried food to Christian prisoners, and when her father stopped her, the bread hidden in her skirts turned to roses. That miracle is here, the roses gathered in her lap. What strikes you most, though, is the dress. Zurbarán clothes an eleventh-century saint as a fashionable Seville noblewoman of his own day, in shimmering silks and a jewelled headband, and lavishes his real attention on the fall and sheen of the cloth.