An attribute dressed in local clothes

The title recorded here does something unusual: it names the saint and then names her costume. Margaret of Antioch is identified in Western art by a dragon, and secondarily by the shepherd's life her legend assigns her before her ordeal — a crook, a bag, a flock. Painting her as a shepherdess makes that second, softer attribute do the identifying work, in the dress of the painter's own country rather than of antiquity. The convention is stable; the wardrobe is local.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1631 and gives the National Gallery in London as its location. Its dimensions are 192 x 112 cm — a tall, narrow upright, the format of a standing full-length figure. It is filed under female portraiture and Religion, the style is given as Baroque, the nationality Spanish, and the measured colour family is red.

Standing figures, sized to a wall

A canvas nearly two metres high and barely a metre wide is a shape with a purpose: it holds one person, at something near life size, and it hangs in series. The record does not say what series this belonged to and none is claimed here. What the measurement does establish is the kind of picture it is — a single standing saint, met at eye level.