Svatá Starosta / Saint Wilgefortis

Peter, Thank you for sending me the Czech saint name. I found this and Svatá Starosta Altar, (open) is the most exiting painting I have seen in over a decade!!!

Svatá Starosta / Saint Wilgefortis

Wilgefortis is a female saint of popular religious imagination whose cult arose in the 14th century.Art historians have argued that the origins of the cult can be found with the Volto Santo of Lucca (picture:Volto Santo), a large 11th century carved wooden figure of Christ on the Cross (now replaced by a 13th century copy), bearded like a man, but dressed in a full-length tunic like a woman instead of the normal loin cloth familiar in the West.] The theory is that when the composition was copied and brought north over the next 150 years, in small copies by pilgrims and dealers, this unfamiliar image led trouser-wearing Northerners to create a narrative to explain the androgynous icon.According to the narrative, sometimes set in Portugal, a teen-aged noblewoman named Wilgefortis had been promised in marriage by her father to a pagan king. To thwart the unwanted wedding, she had taken a vow of virginity, and prayed that she would be made repulsive and in answer to her prayers she sprouted a beard, which ended the engagement. In rage, Wilgefortis's father had her crucified.Wilgefortis was venerated by people seeking relief from tribulations, in particular by women who wished to be liberated ("disencumbered") from abusive husbands.
St Wilgefortis remained popular in the North until the end of the Gothic period; there is an especially attractive carving in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey of a beautiful standing Wilgefortis holding a cross, with a very long beard. She also appears, very lightly bearded, on the outside of a triptych door by Hans Memling . She was decisively exploded during the late 16th century, and thereafter disappears from high art, although lingering well into the 20th century in more popular forms, especially in Bavaria and Austria, but also in northern France and Belgium.

She is often shown with a small fiddler at her feet, and with one shoe off. This derives from a legend, also attached to the Volto Santo of Lucca, of a silver shoe with which the statue had been clothed dropping spontaneously at the feet of a poor pilgrim (eventually pilgrims made off with so much of the Volto Santo that the present replacement was needed). In the Wilgefortis version the poor devotee became a fiddler, perhaps in the 13th century.

(Wikipedia)