The Martyrdom of Saint Florian

A millstone and a pail

Florian is named by two objects that have nothing to do with each other until the legend joins them. He is a Roman officer, and the tradition gives him a millstone — the weight said to have been tied to him before he was thrown into a river — together with a vessel of water, from which the same tradition has him quenching a fire. The second object made him the patron invoked against fire, and that is why the pail travels with him into pictures where no river appears. A title that names a martyrdom is telling you which of the two objects the scene is built around.

What the record holds

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

A saint counted as a group

The category filed here is group portraiture rather than a single figure, which is the ordinary shape of a martyrdom subject: the saint is one body among several, and the others are there to do something to him. In that arrangement the attribute has more work than usual, because the picture does not isolate the person it is naming. Of the 611 works in this catalogue, 2 carry the name Florian in the title.