St Ursula before the King of the Huns

116.5 x 64cm

Legend has it (and there are many versions) that St Ursula was the daughter of a Christian king. The son of a pagan king asked for her hand in marriage, and, wanting to remain a virgin, Ursula obtained a three-year delay. At her request she was given ten young women of noble birth for companionship, and a thousand virgins accompanied each of the eleven. The whole company sailed the seas for three years but then a terrible gale blew-up. The women were carried first to Cologne, then to Basle, and then to Rome where they met Pope Cyriacus. They finally returned to Cologne, where they were interrogated then murdered with arrows by the King of the Huns in hatred of their faith.

This panel is one of four depicting the story of the martyrdom, and once formed part of the lower half of a Spanish altarpiece. It is tempera (a pigment made from egg yolk) on wood. It shows the women being condemned to death by the King of the Huns. The events illustrated may have been taken from the life of the saint as described in Jacopo de Voragine's 'The Golden Legend' (c.1266), which was one of the most widely copied, translated and read books of the late medieval period.

Four more panels showing other scenes from Ursula's life are now in the Prado Museum, Madrid. All of the panels originally came from one large altarpiece, some four metres high, in the Dominican church of San Pablo in Palencia, northwestern Spain. The eight panels along with a further eight smaller paintings portraying individual saints seated on tiled floors (now in museums in America and Sweden), would all originally have surrounded a central image, possibly of the martyrdom. Above this there would probably have been an image of the Crucifixion. The location of these central images is now unknown. Such large altarpiece constructions combining paintings with gilded and painted sculpture and architecture were common in Spanish churches and called 'retablos'.

This panel is on display in room 25 of the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

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