Record details

• generalData.title

  Saint Barbara

• generalData.creationDate

  c. 1500

• generalData.manufacture

  Malines

• technicalData.measurements

  28,5 x 11 x 4 cm

• technicalData.description

  Carved, golden and polychromed wood

• technicalData.complementaryDescription

  This sculpture represents the maiden of Nicomedia kept in a tower with three windows where her father locked her away. In her right hand she holds an open book that records her meditations during her confinement, and her left hand might have originally held the palm of martyrdom. The figure wears a floral crown.
  
  The poupées de Malines —Mechelen dolls— are small sculptures, generally of medium bulk (with minimally worked backs), produced in the small Belgian city, situated north of Flanders between Brussels and Antwerp, which underwent very important economic and cultural developments at the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth with the incorporation of the Dutch into the Spanish Hapsburg Empire. This kind of sculpture, made for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, were produced particularly in the period between 1504 and 1530.