Полиптих святой Варвары

Saint Barbara stands crowned in crimson at the centre of this altarpiece, holding the martyr's palm. She was painted in the early 1520s for a chapel in the Venetian church of Santa Maria Formosa, and the men who paid for her were the city's bombardiers, the gunners who worked Venice's cannon. Barbara was their patron. Her legend had her locked in a tower and struck down, and the man who killed her was said to be destroyed by lightning, so as guns spread through Europe she became the saint of anyone who handled powder and sudden fire. Palma il Vecchio gave the confraternity a commanding figure, calm above the smaller saints in the panels around her. The English novelist George Eliot saw this Barbara on a visit to Venice in 1860 and later wrote her into 'Middlemarch'.