Saint Julia (Crucified Martyress)

The parenthesis is the attribute

Julia is a saint whose sign is her own manner of death: the tradition describes a crucifixion, and painting names her by it, usually with a martyr's palm alongside. The catalogue title here does something unusual — it carries the identification in a bracket, Crucified Martyress, so the record itself is performing the function an attribute performs in a picture. This is the only title in the whole collection that names Julia, which means the record's own gloss is the only guide it offers.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the canvas to 1866 and gives the National Gallery in Prague as its location. The dimensions are 180 x 135 cm, a large upright. It is filed under female portraiture, Religion, Fantasy, and religious and mythological cultural heritage, with two style labels — Romanticism and Symbolism — and Austrian as the nationality; the measured colour family is brown.

Two style labels on one entry

Symbolism appears on 9 entries in this collection and Romanticism on many more; carrying both is a cataloguer's way of describing a picture that sits on a boundary. The two terms are not in conflict here. Romanticism names an attachment to extreme states and to the past; Symbolism, later, names a preference for suggestion over statement and a habit of treating religious subjects as material for interior life rather than as narrative to be reported. On a martyrdom dated 1866, both readings are available, and the record declines to choose between them.