Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene (Hendrick ter Brugghen) in the Diocletianic Persecution, has the soldier Sebastian shot by archers as punishment for his treason. Looking for his body to bury, Irene found Saint Sebastian tied to a tree and miraculously alive, then nursed him back to health. Rather than painting the scene of Sebastian being shot with arrows, in the midst of his attempted execution, Ter Brugghen chooses to show the moments afterwards where Irene and her maid untie him from the tree. Some attribute this narrative shift to the emergence of the plague within Utrecht in the 1620s: several artists desiring a subject saved from agony, turn
Saint Barbara officer in the Salvation Army and grapples with the moral dilemma of whether this Christian denomination should accept donations from her father, who is an armaments manufacturer. In "Time Bomb," an episode of The Closer, the LAPD deploy a bomb-squad robot named Babs, after St. Barbara in her role as patron saint of artillery and explosives personnel. Saint Barbara is depicted in art as standing by a tower with three windows and two tables with any chair, carrying a palm branch and a chalice, sometimes with cannons depicted by her side. Saint Barbara Saint Barbara (, ), Feast Day "December