(Ravenna 1552 – circa 1638)
Saint Justina of Padua,
oil on canvas, 44.5 x 30 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection

We are grateful to Alberto Crispo for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a photograph.

This work is a recent addition to the oeuvre of Barbara Longhi and refers to other depictions of female saints by the artist with similar iconography, size and composition, which gained high popularity as devotional images and even more as "exempla virtutis" amongst Ravennese noblewomen.

The attributes of the book, a palm frond and a small sword in her breast, identify the present saint as Saint Justina of Padua. The cult of Saint Justina spread from Padua to the rest of Italy and eventually reached Ravenna, where the small church Santa Giustina in Capite Porticus was built in the fourteenth century. The image of Saint Justina appears also in the celebrated Byzantine mosaics in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. Another painting with the same subject is known (see L. De Girolami Cheney, Barbara Longhi of Ravenna. Art, Grace and Piety, Cambridge 2023, fig. 78).

Together with her older brother Francesco, Barbara was apprenticed in the workshop of her father Luca Longhi in Ravenna which the two siblings took over after their father’s death in 1580. In 1568 Vasari praised the talent of the young female artist while visiting the house of her father in Ravenna, ‘[she] draws very well, and she has begun to colour some things with good grace and manner’ (see G. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. II, London 1996, p. 779).