Meet Barbara, the Patron Saint of Mathematicians
This beautiful painting on three wooden panels, part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery in London, UK, is known as the Donne triptych, after the donor who commissioned it in the fifteenth century from the Flemish artist Hans Memling.
Memling was well regarded by his contemporaries, as well as by later generations of artists. The nineteenth century poet and artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, even wrote a sonnet to one of his pictures. The faces of saints and angels in Memling’s religious paintings are other-worldly, like the faces of elves, but the surface details of his fabrics and room fittings are lovingly and realistically rendered.
In what was a traditional arrangement for a painting like this one, Memling shows Donne and his family being presented to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ Child by four saints.
Saints in art are traditionally identiable by their “attributes” — objects connected with their story. Saint Stephen, who was stoned to death, is often pictured with a rock on his head, for example. Saint John the Baptist, who appears on the left-hand panel of the Donne triptych, often carries a lamb. (It was John who first described Jesus as the “lamb of God”.) Saint John the Evangelist, on the right-hand panel of Memling’s triptych, holds a cup with a tiny serpent in it, because on one occasion he was given a poisoned chalice to drink from.
The two female Saints in the central panel of the triptych have weightier attributes. Saint Catherine, on the left, carries a long sword. She is more often shown dragging a large, spiked wheel behind her (the instrument of her special torture, before she was decapitated with that sword). Memling makes a subliminal feature of Catherine’s wheel by repurposing it as the water wheel on the mill, in the distance behind her.
Saint Barbara, on the right, is carrying an enormous model of a tower. Barbara is the patron saint of mathematicians(!), architects, miners, firefighters and gunners. Oh, and the Spanish navy.
It’s not unusual for saints to take on multiple portfolios of patronage, as long as some connection can be made to their life story: Saint Anthony of Padua, for example, while best known as the patron saint of lost things (because of a lost notebook that was returned to him), also looks after fishermen, sailors and pregnant women.
So, what’s Barbara’s story, and what is her association with mathematics?
Get Richard Hooper’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Barbara lived in third century Greece (or possibly Egypt) where her over-protective father kept her locked in a tower. During her confinement, and unbeknown to her father, she converted to Christianity. On one occasion when her father was away on business, she altered the plans for a new bath-house that was being built for her (on her father’s instruction), to include three windows rather than the two in the original plan. In doing so, she was deliberately referencing the Holy Trinity. When her father returned, he was incensed, and had Barbara tortured and executed. He was promptly struck by lightning in an act of divine retribution.
The lightning explains Barbara’s association with explosives and all who use them; the tower and bath-house the association with architecture. But what about mathematics?
To while away the long, lonely days in her tower, we’re told that Barbara thought deeply on various academic and philosophical topics. The reorganisation of the windows suggests an interest in geometry in particular. I like to think of Barbara laying out the plan for her circular tower, and marking out three equidistant windows with a pair of compasses. (Her pagan father cannot have objected to her studying Euclid, after all.)
Artists have, naturally, tended to take more artistic licence with the arrangement of the three windows, often showing them all on the same elevation of Barbara’s model tower, so that they are clear to the viewer. Memling’s window scheme is particularly complex and ambiguous. The level just beneath the roof of his tower seems to feature two window openings that are partially obscured by a secondary wall with three blind window spaces. For good measure, there are a further three windows: two on the floor below, and one in the roof.
If it wasn’t geometry that was on her mind, perhaps the proto-mathematician, Barbara, was musing on number theory, and the construction of the sequence of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …), in which every natural number has a “successor”. The nineteenth century German mathematician, Leopold Kronecker, is supposed to have said, “God made the integers, all else is the work of man.”
Whatever she was thinking, Barbara’s commitment to her beliefs to the point of martyrdom meant that, over the centuries, she became revered in the Catholic church. When the seventeenth century Spanish explorer, Sebastián Vizcaíno, was mapping locations for safe harbour along the coast of California, he named a Channel after Santa Barbara (remember, she was the patron saint of the Spanish navy). The Santa Barbara Mission, which later grew into the city of Santa Barbara, was founded there in 1786 by Franciscan friars, with labour provided by the local Chumash people.
And it wasn’t just cities: babies were also traditionally named for saints. In the United States, by the middle of the twentieth century, Barbara was the second most popular name for a baby girl after Mary. The mother of one of these infant Barbaras, Ruth Handler, watched her daughter imagining adult lives and careers for her dolls, and was inspired to create the Barbie doll.
Wait, time out: am I now saying that Barbie is the embodiment of the patron saint of mathematics? That argument is stretched a little thin: a third century martyr with a dubiously mathematical origin story; a tradition of veneration that spread around the world; an explosion of Barbaras in the United States (Saint Barbara would appreciate the explosion metaphor).
My theme might be more profitably developed by writing about the achievements of real-life mathematicians who happen to be called Barbara, or real-life saints with a more authentic claim to have been a mathematician. (Someone who comes close to the latter is Francesco Faà di Bruno, beatified by the Catholic Church in 1988, who wrote a three-volume treatise on the theory and applications of elliptic functions, and tutored Giuseppe Peano, who helped formalise the axioms of natural numbers.)
You might even be doubting (say it quietly) whether Barbara was ever real at all. Still, once you know the curious story of the lady with the tower, you will find yourself looking out for her in other works of art. And if you look out for Saint Barbara, she might just look out for you.
