Barbara in Orthodox Icons

How St. Barbara is depicted in the Byzantine and Slavic icon-tradition specifically: a richly robed maiden, often crowned as a noble or royal virgin, standing frontally in the manner of the holy virgin-martyrs, holding the martyr’s cross and frequently a scroll, sometimes the chalice, with the three-windowed tower beside her. This file treats her appearance in menologion cycles and festal images under 4 December, her pairing with Catherine and the other virgin-martyrs, the notable sites where her image is venerated (above all St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, where her relics rest), and the Orthodox theology of the martyr’s icon — the saint shown already glorified, the instruments of her passion held as trophies, the icon as confession and not as portrait.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; virgin-martyr)

The Standing Virgin-Martyr

In the Byzantine and Slavic icon St. Barbara is depicted according to a fixed and recognizable type: the standing holy virgin-martyr, shown frontally, full-length or half-length, robed in the rich garments of a noble maiden, crowned, and holding in her right hand the small martyr’s cross raised before her and in her left, often, a scroll or the hem of her mantle (Dionysius of Fourna, The ‘Painter’s Manual’, on the depiction of the holy women martyrs, who are shown crowned and holding the cross). Beside her, or held small in her hand, stands her unmistakable attribute, the tower with three windows (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, s.v. “Barbara,” 1962, iconography section). This is the form in which she appears in the festal icon of her feast, in the calendar-icons of the menaion, and on the templon and walls of the churches that bear her name.

Each element of this type is a convention with a meaning, and the conventions are those of the whole class of the holy women martyrs rather than peculiar to Barbara. The frontality is theological: the saint faces the worshipper directly, in the open, glorified posture of one who stands before God and is shown standing before us, available to be addressed in prayer (on the theology of the frontal icon, see below). The rich robes mark her noble station in the legend — the daughter of the eminent Dioscorus, a maiden of princely bearing (Passio Barbarae, Barbara as the daughter of the prominent Dioscorus; recounted in The Three Windows) — and at the same time the festal beauty proper to a glorified saint. The crown carries the double sense developed in this section’s companion file: the diadem of her noble birth and, more deeply, the martyr’s crown of victory (Revelation 2:10; treated in The Tower and the Chalice). The cross in her hand is the standard Byzantine sign of the martyr — the standard under which the contest was won, the confession of the Crucified held up as a trophy. And the scroll, where it appears, may bear a text of her confession or a line of her troparion, making the icon literally a confession in word as well as figure.

The three-windowed tower is the one element that singles Barbara out from the rest of her class. Where the cross, the crown, and the robes place her among the virgin-martyrs generally, the tower says which virgin-martyr, and the three windows say why she is venerated — for the confession of the Trinity she made in cutting the third window (Passio Barbarae, the three windows; The Three Windows). The Byzantine icon is careful to render the tower legibly: it is shown at her side as a slender structure pierced by three openings, or held in her hand as a model, in the manner in which a founder-saint holds a model of his church. In the best tradition the three windows are deliberately counted and grouped so that the Trinitarian reference cannot be missed (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962). The chalice, where the Eastern icon includes it, is held in the left hand or set beside her, signifying her patronage of the last communion; but as the companion file notes, the chalice is more fully developed in the West, and in the Orthodox icon the cross-and-scroll is the more constant pairing (the East/West distinction is set out in The Tower and the Chalice).

Under the Fourth of December: Menologion and Festal Icons

Barbara’s place in the Orthodox image-tradition is fixed first of all by the calendar. She is commemorated on 4 December, the day on which the Synaxarion of Constantinople and the whole Byzantine liturgical tradition keep the Great Martyr Barbara (Synaxarion of Constantinople, 4 December; ed. Delehaye, 1902). Because the Byzantine Church developed the menologion — the illustrated calendar of saints, in which each day’s commemorated saint is depicted in a small standing figure or a scene of martyrdom — Barbara appears in the menologion cycles under her day, shown in the standing virgin-martyr type with her tower, taking her place in the procession of the saints that the menologion arrays across the liturgical year. The great illuminated menologia (such as the eleventh-century Menologion of Basil II) and the painted calendar-cycles on the walls of Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches include her among the December saints, and the wall-calendars of the Athonite and Serbian and Russian traditions carry her likewise under 4 December.

The festal icon of her feast shows Barbara herself in the standing type, sometimes flanked by small scenes (klejma, in the Slavic vocabulary, the marginal scenes of a vita-icon) drawn from the Passio: the tower and the three windows, the confession before Dioscorus, the tortures, the beheading, and the lightning that struck her father (Passio Barbarae, the narrative episodes; on the lightning, The Father’s Hand and the Lightning). The vita-icon, with its central standing figure ringed by narrative scenes, is the characteristic Orthodox way of telling a saint’s whole story while keeping the glorified saint, not the narrative, at the center — the episodes are border, the saint is the icon. This ordering is itself theological: the suffering is told in the margins, but the figure in the center is already victorious, already crowned, holding the cross of her confession as a trophy and not as a burden (the theology is developed below).

Pairing with the Virgin-Martyrs

Barbara is very rarely the only saint in the image. The Orthodox tradition characteristically depicts the holy virgin-martyrs together, in companies — ranks of crowned maidens, each with her cross and her distinguishing attribute — and within these companies Barbara is most often paired with St. Catherine of Alexandria, the other great virgin-martyr of the late-antique tradition (on Catherine, see St. Catherine of Alexandria). The two are natural companions: both are depicted as noble or royal virgins, both are crowned, both hold the martyr’s cross, and the pair are told apart by their attributes — Catherine by her wheel, Barbara by her three-windowed tower. They appear together on iconostases, in deesis ranks of the saints, and in the festal compositions that gather the choirs of the martyrs, and the pairing is so frequent that the two are, in the visual tradition, a kind of matched set of the virgin-martyr ideal.

This habit of depicting the virgin-martyrs in company is not incidental. It expresses the Orthodox understanding of the saints as a communion — not isolated heroes but members of one body, the great multitude that no man can number, standing together before the throne (Revelation 7:9). Barbara takes her place in the choir of the holy women, beside Catherine, Marina, Paraskeva, Anastasia, and the rest, and the icon that ranks them together is confessing that they are one company in glory. The pairing with Catherine in particular has the further force that the two saints’ legends rhyme — both are late, both depict a learned or reasoning virgin who out-argues or out-confesses her persecutors, both end in beheading — so that the visual pairing carries a typological likeness as well (the source-critical questions about both legends are treated, for Barbara, across this collection’s earlier sections and, for Catherine, in her own collection — see St. Catherine of Alexandria).

Where Her Image Is Venerated: Kyiv and Beyond

Barbara’s icon is venerated wherever her feast is kept, but it has a particular focus in the Slavic world, and above all in Kyiv. The relics of St. Barbara were, by the dominant tradition, translated to Kyiv in the medieval period and enshrined at the St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery (Mykhailivskyi Zolotoverkhyi), where they became one of the great objects of pilgrimage of the Kyivan Church and where her shrine-icon was a focus of veneration for centuries (on the relics and their history, see The Relics in Kyiv). The presence of the relics made Kyiv a center of Barbara’s cult in the Orthodox East, and her image there — at the reliquary, on the templon, in the wall-program of St. Michael’s — became a principal type of her depiction in the Russian and Ukrainian tradition. From Kyiv her veneration radiated through the Slavic lands, and she is widely depicted in Russian, Ukrainian, and Serbian churches, frequently in the company of the other virgin-martyrs, and named in the prayers against sudden and unprovided death that her patronage attaches to (the patronage is treated in The Viaticum Saint). [Disputed (provenance of the relics, per METHODOLOGY §3.5): the tradition of the translation of Barbara's relics to Kyiv and their enshrinement at St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery is the dominant Slavic account and the ground of her Kyivan cult, but the early history of the relics is contested and the translation is a matter of tradition rather than documented fact; the relic-history and its rival claims are the subject of [The Relics in Kyiv](../06-relics-and-the-cult/the-relics-in-kyiv.md). The iconographic point — that Kyiv is a principal center of her veneration and of her image in the Slavic tradition — stands independently of the resolution of the relic question.]

The Theology of the Martyr’s Icon

What an icon of a martyr is, in the Orthodox understanding, governs every feature of Barbara’s depiction, and it is the proper conclusion of this file. The icon is not a portrait and not an illustration. It is, in the definition of the Second Council of Nicaea (Nicaea II, 787), the Seventh Ecumenical Council, a holy image whose veneration (proskynesis) passes to its prototype and is distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (Nicaea II, 787, the Horos; on the council, Icons and Iconoclasm). The honor paid to Barbara’s image passes to Barbara, and through her to the Trinity she confessed at the three windows. The icon is therefore a confession, not a likeness: it does not aim to record what a fourth-century Heliopolitan woman looked like — of which nothing is or can be known — but to confess what she is now, a glorified member of the body of Christ.

This is why the martyr’s icon shows the saint already glorified and not in the act of suffering. Barbara is not depicted bleeding under the sword or burning, but standing, crowned, robed, serene, holding the cross. The tortures are told, if at all, in the small border-scenes; the figure at the center is the saint in glory. The instruments of her passion, where they appear, are held as trophies and not as torments: the cross is the standard of her victory, the tower is the site of her confession, the crown is her reward. The icon shows the end of the story, not its agony — the saint who has “fought the good fight” and received “the crown of righteousness” (2 Timothy 4:7–8), the conqueror “with palms in their hands” before the throne (Revelation 7:9). This is the deepest difference between the Orthodox icon of a martyr and the dramatic martyrdom-scenes of later Western painting: the icon does not dwell on the suffering but confesses the glory, because its subject is not the death but the saint who is alive in God.

St. John of Damascus, the great defender of the icons, gives the ground of this in the Incarnation and in the deification of the saints: because God became visible in the flesh, the holy may be imaged; and because the saints are filled with the Holy Spirit and made friends of God, their images are venerated and their persons honored as living members of Christ (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images; trans. Louth, 2003). The icon of Barbara, on this understanding, is a window — and the figure is apt, given her three windows — through which the worshipper looks not at a dead woman of the past but at a living saint who stands before God and intercedes. The frontality of the figure is the visible form of this: she faces the one who prays, because she is present to be addressed, a member of the communion of saints who hears and intercedes (on the communion of saints and the veneration of their images, Icons and Iconoclasm).

It follows that the Orthodox icon of Barbara is canonically governed in a way the Western devotional image is not, and the East/West distinctions traced in this section’s companion file are, at root, this difference. The Orthodox icon keeps to the type — the standing virgin-martyr, the cross, the crown, the three-windowed tower — because the type is a confession and the canon guards the confession; it does not admit the freer devotional attributes (the Host-surmounted chalice, the peacock, the cannon) that belong to the Western tradition’s different register (the attributes and their provenance are set out in The Tower and the Chalice). To venerate the Orthodox icon of Barbara is therefore to confess, with her and in the form the Church has fixed, the Trinity she professed at the three windows and the victory God gave her — which is exactly what an icon, in the Orthodox understanding, is for: not to remember a face, but to confess a faith and to stand before a living saint (the dogma is developed in Icons and Iconoclasm, and the Trinitarian confession itself in The Holy Trinity).

References

Passio Sanctae Barbarae (BHG 213–218; BHL 913–959). The legendary Greek and Latin Acts of St. Barbara, with the Metaphrastic recension (Symeon Metaphrastes, 10th c.). Cited by episode: Barbara as the noble daughter of Dioscorus; the tower and the three windows; the confession; the tortures, the beheading, and the lightning — the narrative material of the vita-icon’s border scenes. A late legendary text.
Synaxarion of Constantinople (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae), 4 December; ed. H. Delehaye. Brussels, 1902. (The anchor of the Orthodox commemoration of the Great Martyr Barbara under which she appears in menologion cycles.)
Dionysius of Fourna. The ‘Painter’s Manual’ (Hermeneia tēs zōgraphikēs technēs), early 18th c. Trans. Paul Hetherington. London: Sagittarius Press, 1974. (The Byzantine handbook of iconographic convention; the depiction of the holy women martyrs — crowned, robed, holding the cross of confession.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, s.v. “Barbara.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1962. (Modern reference, iconography section: the three-windowed tower as her unmistakable attribute; her depiction among the virgin-martyrs; the Eastern and Western conventions.)
Second Council of Nicaea (Nicaea II), 787, the Horos (Definition). (The dogma of the holy image; veneration [proskynesis] passing to the prototype, distinct from worship [latreia].)
John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. (The Incarnational and deification ground of the saint’s icon; the image as the icon of one alive in God.)
Holy Scripture: Revelation 2:10 (the crown of life); Revelation 7:9 (the multitude with palms); 2 Timothy 4:7–8 (the good fight, the crown of righteousness). Cited by book chapter:verse.