Santa Águeda

Zurbaran worked in Seville in the years after the Council of Trent had told painters what the Church now wanted from religious art: saints shown plainly and movingly, in a way that stirred ordinary faith. Agatha was one they specifically asked for. She was a young Sicilian woman put to death around the year 250 for refusing a Roman official, who had her breasts cut off before she was killed. Zurbaran shows her not in agony but composed, richly dressed, carrying the two severed breasts on a metal plate as calmly as if they were loaves of bread. That calm is the point. Spanish viewers knew the story and supplied the horror themselves. Her clothes get more attention than her wound, the heavy folds given the same still, sculptural weight Zurbaran brought to the monks and saints he painted all over Seville.