Page:Woman in Art.djvu/41

WOMAN IN ART night by beckoning stars taught her the idea of knowledge, lifted the thoughts of the young girl, till her soul acknowledged, as did the Greeks in the days of Paul, "an unknown God."

Surely the idols of wood and stone worshiped by her father and mother could not have made the heavens that compelled her gaze and her reverence. Hearing of a saintly man in Alexandria who expounded the fact and teaching of such a God as nature told her of, she wrote to him, sending the letter by the hand of a trusted messenger, who brought in reply a letter from one of the great leaders of the new faith, Origin; and through the teaching of one of his disciples Barbara accepted the love and faith of the Christ, and became a baptized Christian.

Legend now embellishes the seeming facts. When her father returned from an absence he was furious that his daughter had become a Christian, and attempted to kill her. But by angels she was wrapped from his view and carried to a distance. Some shepherds pointed to her hiding place, from which her father dragged her, and shut her in a dungeon. In short, she was tormented for a long time, after which her cruel parent cut off her head.

In this legend we have the new, the spiritual element in the development of woman. All the paintings of Santa Barbara are represented with the tower of her imprisonment, a crown of spikes, a sword, arms or armor, and always the palm of peace. Palma Veccho put on canvas his ideal of the woman whose character warranted the legend, portraying her with dignity, poise, and serenity, as a product of Christian virtues blooming like a flower in the desert of paganism.

Whatever of truth is in the legend will last, while the fiction that has been added will fall away as dead leaves or calyx that have encased a lovely flower.

We of today look to the prophetic, literary, and artistic merits of such a character, but may never know the full spiritual influence of Santa Barbara's story on millions in those mediaeval times, who had no books and scant teaching.

Let us not forget that Barbara and her legend were of the third century, and that Palma and others painted idealized pictures of her twelve hundred years later. That means thirty-six generations for the Christianizing and developing of the race. Hence models for fifteenth century painters were far in advance of her time.

True, the Dark Ages intervened, so we will consider a woman of that period; the period that followed centuries of wars, that saw Greece broken and pillaged by Rome; that saw the cross on the imperial standard of Rome, and Christianity declared the religion of the Empire. 29