Santa Isabel de Portugal

Zurbaran painted this in Seville in the 1630s, when Spain's church wanted saints who felt close enough to touch. So he dressed a medieval queen in the heavy silks and lace of a Spanish noblewoman of his own day, the kind of woman his Seville patrons saw at Mass. She is Elizabeth of Portugal, married to a king who forbade her to give money to the poor. The story goes that he stopped her one winter and demanded to see what she was carrying in her skirts. She let the folds of her dress fall open, and the bread she had hidden there had turned to roses. Zurbaran shows her crowned and richly dressed, a little older than the story needs, holding the flowers as calmly as if she had gathered them herself.