¡A esta santa Bárbara jamás me encomendé!

In the process of colonization of Hispanic America, the Spanish Crown centered its efforts to propagate the Catholic faith through the rhetoric of images of saints from the early times of Christianity as a model for achieving salvation. In this context, the legend of Saint Barbara—one of the most important figures in the consolidation of Christianity—stood out. However, her representation with the traditional attributes of tower, chalice, and sword, common in medieval Europe, underwent a substantial transformation in some churches of the current Cundinamarca- Boyacá region: in painting and sculpture, Saint Barbara was depicted in the moment of her torture of cutting off her breasts, a fact not registered in the primitive hagiography of the protectress against thunder and patron saint of good death. By means of a chronological and iconographic analysis of 220 images of Saint Barbara, made between the 15th and 18th centuries, this book identifies both the conventional representation of the saint and its variations in Europe and America, in order to propose hypotheses about the conditionings of artists in the New Kingdom of Granada for the execution of the image of the so-called baroque Saint Barbara.