Castillian School. Circa 1500. Saint Quiteria and Saint Barbara Oil or tempera with gold background on panel. Fragment of an altarpiece, possibly belonging to a predella. 37,5 x 40,5 cm. Even though we have not been able to recognise the master behind these two saints, his great artistic skill is evident. The faces of both saints are delightful and of unfathomable sweetness. An exceptional panel that shows the splendour of the Aragonese Renaissance, both in the colour palette, with those shimmering tones on the tunics, as well as in the physiognomy of the models and the flesh tones on their faces and hands in tempera and oil. It is also evident in the perfect gold ground-covered surface for the backdrop, decorated with plant motifs and pointillé, a decorative technique used on gold which consisted of engraving different drawings with small chisel strokes or pricks, thereby pushing down the smooth gilded surface or the stucco mass. There is no doubt as to which saints they are, as they are named on their limbs, Quiteria and Barbara. Quiteria was alive during the 2nd century A.D. The daughter of a pagan Roman governor, her mother gave her up for adoption, along with her eight siblings, to prevent her honesty from being questioned and to preserve her virginity. According to Christian doctrine, this adoption brought her closer to God. Always linked to prayer, as she appears reading a book of hours, she would eventually meet her parents. Tradition has it that her father, as soon as he learned of her profession of faith, had her head cut off. Barbara came from Nicomedia, on the Anatolian Peninsula, in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD. Highly intelligent, she was the daughter of Diocorus, a wealthy pagan man. Through her reading and studies she questioned her paganism, and because of her religious concerns, she was instructed in the catechism and converted to the Christian faith. Because of her physical beauty, she had no shortage of suitors, but she kept herself a virgin in order to consecrate herself to God. Her father had a tower built to keep her from the eyes of strangers. On one of her father's journeys, she herself ordered the workmen to build a third window (she only had two) to honour the Holy Trinity. She was tortured for her faith, but she did not die as she received help and care from heaven. As she refused to worship the pagan gods, her father finally cut off her head. After decapitating her, her father was struck by lightning and no trace of his body was left. In the panel, she is shown holding her most characteristic attribute, the tower in which she was imprisoned, at a reduced scale on her hand, as if it were a model. A moulding runs along it and frames it in the manner of the Gothic lines to strengthen a wall or window, in which verticality predominates over horizontality, underlining the mysticism of the figures it contains. This panel would clearly have formed part of the 'flos sanctorum' of the lower predellas or side sections of an altarpiece. Finally, it is interesting to note that marks of the gouge can still be seen on the back of the boards which are assembled horizontally and which form the panel, and the remains of rabbit glue dissolved in water as a grout can be seen, erasing imperfections and smoothing out the pine boards, the most advanced material used at that time for this type of work.