Saint Margaret of Antioch

Zurbarán painted Saint Margaret of Antioch around 1631, one of his standing saint series in which she appears not in the stylized grandeur of Byzantine icon tradition but in the specific costume of a seventeenth-century Spanish shepherdess carrying a book and the dragon she is said to have subdued. The incongruous combination of contemporary dress and exotic attribute — the tamed dragon beside a figure of domestic feminine piety — was characteristic of Zurbarán's approach to hagiographic subject matter: the miraculous event registered through the attribute but the figure rendered in the realistic present of the Seville he knew. This grounded, naturalistic treatment of the miraculous was central to the Counter-Reformation program of making sacred subjects accessible and emotionally immediate for lay devotion.

The figure stands monumentally against a plain dark background, with Zurbarán's sculptural rendering of the stiff brocade and the saddlebag she carries creating a vivid, almost trompe-l'oeil effect.