BARBARA, Saint, Martyr. - Concerning the life and martyrdom of B. no historical records worthy of credence have been preserved. The Passio is a late compilation (7th century) full of implausibilities, probably of Egyptian origin. It was soon translated into Latin and adapted to its new setting; of this version three recensions are known, which inspired certain martyrological notices of the 9th century. The Saint is said to have been martyred at the beginning of the 4th century, under the emperor Maximian, in a city that varies according to the texts of the Passio and the authors of the martyrologies: indeed Antioch, Heliopolis near Eucata, Nicomedia, Rome and even a region, Tuscia, appear.
The day of the martyrdom and of the feast is fixed, both in the East and in the West, on December 4; Ado, followed by Usuard, assigns it to the 16th of the same month, as does the Coptic calendar.
The content of the Passio can be summarized roughly as follows: B., a young woman of rare beauty, is shut up by her father, Dioscorus, in a comfortable tower so that she may not be contaminated by the world. The father, having learned that she was a Christian (she had baptized herself), denounces her to the prefect of the province Martinian; she is condemned, and the father undertakes to carry out the death sentence, but shortly after the execution a lightning bolt reduces the unworthy parent to ashes. The texts of the Passio known to us, with the exception of one or another, give a St. Juliana as B.'s companion in martyrdom.
The oldest monument that recalls St. B. dates to the 8th century and consists of a painting found in the church of S. Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum. From the 9th century onward the testimonies relating to the cult: churches, oratories (the text of John the Deacon in the life of St. Gregory the Great [IV, 89: PL 75, 234] has value only for the end of the 9th century), altars, monasteries, etc., become ever more numerous, in the West as in the East. Later she was numbered among the 14 Holy Helpers (v.) and was invoked in a particular way to obtain the grace of receiving the Sacraments at the point of death. Artillerymen and miners have chosen her as patroness so that she may protect them from any fatal explosion, which could bring them to death, as the crash of lightning reduced to ashes, according to the Passio, her inhuman parent.
BBL.: BHL, 913-14 (supplement, pp. 40-41); BHG, 213-218 (cf. Anal. Boll., 64 (1946), p. 249); BHO, 132-34; Martyr. Romanum, p. 564; Lanzoni, pp. 385, 541-43; P. Paschini, S. B. Note agiografiche (Lateranum), Rome 1927 (critical study); E. Tea, La basilica di S. Maria Antiqua, Milan 1937, p. 290. See also Anal. Boll., 60 (1942), p. 273, vernacular poems on St. B.; ibid., 64 (1946), p. 10, invocation: «quand le tonnerre tombera, Ste Barbe nous préservera».
A. Pietro Frutaz
ICONOGRAPHY
While the crown, the palm and the sword, the instrument of her final torture, characterize the Saint as a martyr, in her iconography there also appear the peacock, a tower, whose three windows allude to the Most Holy Trinity and, from the 15th century, also a chalice, which indicates her as protectress of the dying. Among Flemish artists, Jan van Eyck (Antwerp) and Memling (Chatsworth, Bruges, Brussels) left us distinguished images of the Saint. In the Italian Quattrocento painters of all schools - for example, Jacopo dei Barbari, Boltraffio, G. Cozzarelli, Fr. Francia, Matteo di Giovanni, Cos. Rosselli, Bart. Vivarini - vie in depicting her both alone and grouped with other saints; in the Cinquecento Raphael paints her in the Sistine Madonna and Palma il Vecchio in the altarpiece of S. Maria Formosa in Venice. For the legend of the Saint, already represented in a German illuminated manuscript of the 12th century, a Silesian artist offers us in the altarpiece of the same name in the museum of Breslau (1447) one of the most extensive cycles of scenes; the scene of the flight from the tower was painted by Pinturicchio in a celebrated fresco of the Borgia apartments in the Vatican.
