The Departure of Saint Florain

The saint of the water bucket

Florian is identified by a pail or bucket of water, sometimes poured over a burning building, and by the millstone that his legend attaches to his death. He is also given Roman military dress, because the tradition remembers him as an officer. The bucket is the reason he became the patron invoked against fire, and it is one of the plainest attributes in the whole system: an ordinary household object, held by a soldier, and no further explanation required. 3 titles in this collection name him — this entry spells the name Florain, and the spelling is reproduced here as the record has it.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1530 and gives the Uffizi Gallery in Florence as its location. No dimensions are recorded. It is filed under group portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with Northern Renaissance as the style and German as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

A departure rather than a martyrdom

The title names a departure, which places the subject before the end of the story rather than at it. Pictures of this kind belong to narrative cycles, where one saint's legend is divided into episodes and each panel carries a stage of it. The record says nothing about what this scene accompanied, and no sequence is claimed here.