Saint Casilda Before Her Father
Oil on canvas
Cathedral of Burgos, Spain
The painting illustrates a legend in Burgos cathedral, where a chapel is dedicated to St. Casilda. The legend says that Casilda was the daughter of the Moslem king of Toledo. Every day she would take a basket of bread to the prison where her father held Christian captives. One day her father stopped her and demanded to know what was in her basket. She said "roses." He looked into the basket, and miraculously the bread had turned into roses. In the 13th century a similar episode appeared in vitae of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose portraits consequently also pictured her with roses or bread in a basket or the folds of her skirt.
The crooked and leafless tree in the background may be a metaphor for the religion from which the saint is emerging.
In the bottom left of the painting two prisoners look up at Casilda as she shows her father the roses.
Read more about images of St. Casilda.
Photographed at the cathedral by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.