Читать книгу The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures - Bryant - Страница 8

St. Barbara, born a. d. 303, was a very beautiful girl. Her father, an eastern nobleman, loved her so much and was so afraid something might happen to her that he built a very wonderful tower for her home and shut her up in it. And in that tower she studied the stars. Night after night she looked at the heavenly bodies until she knew more about the sun and the moon and the stars than any of the learned men. But as she studied the shining bodies she decided that worshiping idols, made of wood and stone, as her father did, was wrong. Finally she learned about the Savior, and to show her faith in Christianity she had some workmen who were making repairs on her tower put in three windows. When her father came as usual to visit her, he asked in surprise what the three windows were for. She replied:

"Know, my father, that through three windows doth the soul receive light, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: and the three are one."

Her father was very angry when he found she had learned about the Savior and had become a Christian. He condemned her to death and at last took her out on a hill and killed her, but he, too, was struck dead. St. Barbara is always represented with a tower that has three windows in it.

Palma Vecchio painted this picture for some Venetian soldiers nearly four hundred years ago. When the Germans bombarded Venice (1918) the Venetians took the picture from the church to a place of safety. Scarcely a week had passed before a bomb broke through the roof of the church tearing everything before it at the exact spot where the picture had hung. But "St. Barbara," one of the great pictures of the world, was safe.