The Tower and the Chalice

St. Barbara’s iconographic attributes form a small system of signs, each rooted in an episode of her Passio (BHG 213–218) or in an office of her patronage: the three-windowed tower (her primary and unmistakable attribute, the tower of her confinement bearing the three windows of her Trinitarian confession); the chalice (in the West often surmounted by a Host), the sign of her patronage of the last communion; the palm of martyrdom; the martyr’s cross and the crown; and the Western-only peacock feather and the lightning or cannon of her occupational patronage. This file sets out each attribute, its symbolism, its rootedness in the legend, and the points where the Eastern and Western conventions diverge, and grounds the theology these signs carry in the Orthodox dogma of the holy image.

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

A Saint Known by Her Sign

Among the holy women of the Church, St. Barbara is one of the very few who can be identified at a glance and without a name, because her primary attribute belongs to her alone. The wheel marks Catherine, the eyes-on-a-dish mark Lucy, the tongs mark Agatha; the tower with three windows marks Barbara, and the Church has given that tower to no other saint (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, s.v. “Barbara,” 1962, iconography section). The strength of this iconographic vocabulary is that it is keyed at every point to the narrative of the Passio: the tower is the place of her confinement, the three windows are her confession of the Trinity, the chalice is her dying communion, the palm and the cross are her martyrdom, the crown is her victory and her noble birth, and the lightning in the background is the manner of her father’s punishment. The image is, in this sense, the legend compressed into a set of signs — which is precisely what an attribute is: a fixed visual abbreviation by which the worshipper reads the saint’s whole story in a single glance (on the legend itself, see The Three Windows and The Father’s Hand and the Lightning).

What follows treats each attribute in turn, beginning with the tower — the indispensable one, without which the figure is not Barbara — and proceeding to the chalice, the palm, the cross, the crown, and the lesser and largely Western signs. Throughout, two distinctions are kept. The first is between East and West: the Byzantine and Slavic icon and the Western painted image draw on the same Passio but deploy its signs differently, and several attributes (the Host above the chalice, the peacock feather, the cannon) belong to the Western tradition and are not native to the Orthodox icon (per METHODOLOGY §4 on tradition-specific conventions). The second is between what the Passio itself supplies and what the later cult added: the tower and the windows are in the text; the cannon is a development of the gunpowder age, read back onto her by association.

The Three-Windowed Tower

The tower is Barbara’s primary and defining attribute. In the Passio, her father Dioscorus, jealous of her beauty and resolved to keep her from suitors and from the Christians, shuts her up in a tower he has built; and there, or in a bath-house attached to it, the episode of the three windows unfolds (Passio Barbarae, the tower and the bath-house; recounted in The Three Windows). In her father’s absence Barbara orders the workmen to cut a third window where two had been planned, and when Dioscorus demands why, she confesses that the three windows signify the Holy Trinity, the threefold Light by which the soul is illumined (Passio Barbarae, the confession of the three windows; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962). The tower in Barbara’s iconography is therefore never a neutral architectural prop. It is the site of her confession, and the three windows are its theological heart: a depiction of Barbara that shows the tower with three openings is showing, in stone, the creed she died for.

The convention is firm enough that the windows are counted. In careful depictions the tower is pierced by exactly three windows — frequently set in a vertical row or grouped at the top of the tower — so that the number is legible and the Trinitarian reference unmistakable (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962, iconography section). Where the tower is shown with a different number the reference is weakened, and the better tradition is careful to keep it three. The tower is shown sometimes at Barbara’s side, sometimes held small in her hand as a model (in the manner in which a founder holds a model church), and sometimes in the background of the scene; but in every case the three windows do the same work. They are the visual form of the dogma of the one God in three Persons — three real and distinct openings, one undivided light — which is exactly the reading the Passio and the Church’s hymnography place on them (the theology is developed in The Three Windows, and the dogma itself in The Holy Trinity).

This is the deepest point about Barbara’s iconography and the one that distinguishes her from saints whose attribute is merely the instrument of their death. The wheel of Catherine and the gridiron of Lawrence are instruments of torture; Barbara’s tower is the instrument of a confession. It is not the thing that killed her — that was her father’s sword and the lightning from heaven — but the thing in which she professed the faith. Her primary attribute is, uniquely, a creed in architectural figure, and the icon that gives her the three-windowed tower is doing the proper work of an icon: confessing a doctrine, not merely identifying a person (on what an icon confesses, see Barbara in Orthodox Icons and Icons and Iconoclasm).

The Chalice

After the tower, the attribute most associated with Barbara is the chalice — the cup, and in the Western tradition very often a cup with a Host (the consecrated bread) rising above it or set upon its rim. The chalice signifies Barbara’s patronage of the last communion: she is, above all her other patronages, the saint invoked that one may not die without the Holy Mysteries, that the dying may receive the Eucharist as viaticum, the provision for the journey (the patronage is developed in The Viaticum Saint). The cup in her hand is the cup of that final communion, and the Host above it makes the reference explicit: she is the patroness of the Blessed Sacrament received at the end.

The rootedness of the chalice in the Passio is at one remove and worth stating precisely. The Passio does not place a chalice in Barbara’s hand as a property of the narrative; the chalice is an attribute of her patronage, not a prop of her legend, and it entered her iconography as the cult of the good death gathered around her (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962, iconography section). But the patronage itself is keyed to the Passio: Barbara, in the legend, is baptized and dies illumined and in grace, in pointed contrast to her father, who is struck down by lightning in his impenitence (Passio Barbarae, the baptism and the lightning; The Father’s Hand and the Lightning). She is the saint who died with the Mysteries against the man who died without repentance, and from that contrast descends her office as patroness of the prepared death — the office the chalice confesses. There is, further, the older martyrological resonance of “the cup”: the martyr drinks “the cup that I drink” (Mark 10:38–39), the cup of Christ’s own passion, so that the chalice in a martyr’s hand carries at once the Eucharistic cup and the cup of martyrdom. In Barbara both senses meet — she drank the cup of martyrdom and she is patroness of the cup of the last communion — and the attribute is the richer for it.

[Disputed (East/West convention, per METHODOLOGY §4): the chalice — and especially the chalice surmounted by a Host — is most fully developed as Barbara's attribute in the **Western** tradition, where it is her standard sign after the tower (so *Bibliotheca Sanctorum*, vol. 2, s.v. "Barbara," 1962, iconography section). In the **Eastern** icon Barbara holds most characteristically the martyr's cross and a scroll, and the chalice, where it appears, does so secondarily; the Host-above-the-cup, being a depiction of the Latin manner of the consecrated species, is proper to Western imagery and is not a native feature of the Byzantine icon. The collection reports the chalice as a genuine Barbara attribute while marking the Host-surmounted form as a Western convention.]

The Palm, the Cross, and the Crown

Three further attributes Barbara shares with the whole company of the martyrs, and they place her in that company rather than singling her out. The palm is the universal sign of martyrdom — the palm of victory carried by the conqueror, given to every martyr as the token of the contest won (Revelation 7:9, the great multitude “with palms in their hands”; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962). A palm in Barbara’s hand says only, and sufficiently, that she is a martyr; it is the tower beside it that says which martyr.

The martyr’s cross — the small hand-cross held upright between the fingers — is, in the Byzantine tradition especially, the standard sign of the martyr, and it is the attribute Barbara most regularly holds in the Orthodox icon (Dionysius of Fourna, The ‘Painter’s Manual’, on the holy women martyrs, who are shown holding the cross of confession). The cross is not the instrument of her death but the sign of her confession of the Crucified: the martyr holds the cross as the soldier holds his standard, the emblem under which the contest was waged and won. In the Eastern icon this hand-cross does much of the work the palm does in the West, and Barbara is far more often shown holding the cross than the palm (on the convention, see Barbara in Orthodox Icons).

The crown carries, as with Catherine, a double sense. In the developed legend Barbara is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent man, a maiden of noble or princely station, and the crown marks her rank — she is depicted as a royal or noble virgin (Passio Barbarae, Barbara as daughter of the eminent Dioscorus; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962). But the crown is also and more deeply the martyr’s crown, the stephanos of victory promised to “him that is faithful unto death” (Revelation 2:10), the crown of the contest that the martyrs receive. In the icon the two senses are not in competition: the noble virgin crowned in the world is crowned again, and more truly, as a martyr, and the single crown carries both. Barbara is thus shown crowned both for what she was on earth and for what she became in heaven.

The Lesser and Western Attributes: the Peacock, the Lightning, the Cannon

A handful of further signs attach to Barbara in particular regional or, more often, Western traditions, and the discipline of this section is to name them as such and not to read them back into the Orthodox icon.

The peacock feather (or the peacock) appears in some Western depictions of Barbara, where it is generally understood as a sign of immortality — the peacock being, in early Christian symbolism, an emblem of incorruption and the resurrection life (its flesh anciently held to be incorruptible) — and so a fitting attribute of a saint glorified (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962). [Disputed (attribution and East/West, per METHODOLOGY §3.5/§4): the peacock or peacock feather is a **Western** and regional attribute of Barbara, not a feature of the Byzantine icon; its sense (immortality/resurrection) is supplied by the general Christian symbolism of the peacock rather than by anything in the *Passio*, and it is the least securely established of Barbara's attributes. The collection reports it as a Western devotional sign and does not treat it as part of the Orthodox iconographic vocabulary.]

The lightning, fire, or — in the modern Western image — the cannon and the powder-tower in the background belong to Barbara’s occupational patronage rather than to the core of her image. The lightning is rooted directly in the Passio: her father Dioscorus, having beheaded her with his own hand, is struck down by lightning from heaven (Passio Barbarae, the death of Dioscorus; The Father’s Hand and the Lightning), and from this descends her patronage against lightning, fire, and sudden death, and thence against the dangers of explosives. The cannon and the artillery-piece, however, are a development of the gunpowder age: Barbara became patroness of gunners, miners, sappers, and all who handle explosives, and the navies named the powder-magazine the Santa Barbara (French Sainte-Barbe) for her, and the cannon entered her imagery by that association (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, 1962; the patronage is treated under The Viaticum Saint and its companion file). [Disputed (origin, per METHODOLOGY §3.5): the lightning derives directly from the *Passio* (the manner of Dioscorus' death); the cannon and powder-tower are a post-medieval, largely Western development tied to the gunpowder trades and the naval *Santa Barbara*, read back onto the saint by occupational association and absent from the early image. The collection pins the lightning to the *Passio* and marks the cannon as a later patronal accretion.]

The Theology the Signs Carry

It remains to say what these signs are, theologically, and why an Orthodox treatment of them belongs in a study of the saint and not merely in a catalogue of art. An attribute is not decoration. In the Orthodox understanding the holy image is a confession of faith in visible form, and its dogmatic standing was defined at the Second Council of Nicaea (Nicaea II, 787), the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which restored the icons against the iconoclasts and decreed that the veneration (proskynesis) paid to the image passes to its prototype, and is distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (Nicaea II, 787, the Horos; on the council and its dogma, Icons and Iconoclasm). The icon of Barbara is therefore not a portrait of a woman but a confession of the faith she confessed: when the worshipper venerates the image, the honor passes to Barbara, and through her to the God she died for.

St. John of Damascus, whose three treatises On the Divine Images are the classic defense of the icon, grounds the whole practice in the Incarnation: because the invisible God has become visible in the flesh of Christ, the visible may now image the holy, and the saints — who bear the divine image and are filled with the Spirit — may be depicted and honored as friends of God (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images; trans. Louth, 2003). On this understanding Barbara’s attributes are confessions in little: the three-windowed tower confesses the Trinity she professed, the chalice confesses the Mysteries she patronizes and the cup of martyrdom she drank, the cross confesses the Crucified under whose standard she contended, and the crown confesses the victory God gave her. The signs are not symbols in a decorative sense but theology made legible — which is exactly what the Damascene says the icon is, “a book for the unlettered,” a confession set where it can be seen.

This is why the East/West distinctions traced above matter, and matter dogmatically and not merely art-historically. The Orthodox icon is governed by the canon of the tradition, which fixes how a saint is shown so that the image confesses rightly; the Western painted image, working in a different and freer devotional register, admits attributes (the Host-surmounted chalice, the peacock, the cannon) that belong to its own development. To distinguish them is not to disparage the Western image but to be exact about what the Orthodox icon of Barbara is: a confession, kept to its canon, of the Trinity she professed at the three windows and the Mysteries she died receiving (the icon itself is the subject of Barbara in Orthodox Icons).

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: the tower of confinement and the bath-house; the three windows and the confession of the Trinity; the baptism; the beheading by Dioscorus and his death by lightning. A late legendary text, the source of the tower, the windows, and the lightning.
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 2, s.v. “Barbara.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1962. (Modern Catholic reference, including the iconography section: the three-windowed tower as primary attribute; the chalice and the Host; the palm and crown; the peacock and the cannon as Western and patronal attributes.)
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 holy women martyrs shown holding the cross of confession.)
Second Council of Nicaea (Nicaea II), 787, the Horos (Definition). (The dogma of the holy image; the distinction of veneration [proskynesis] from worship [latreia]; the honor passing to the prototype.)
John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. (The Incarnational ground of the icon; the icon as confession and “a book for the unlettered.”)
Holy Scripture: Revelation 2:10 (the crown of life, “faithful unto death”); Revelation 7:9 (the palms in the hands of the multitude); Mark 10:38–39 (the cup of martyrdom). Cited by book chapter:verse.