What better way to celebrate Easter than watching some Christian pain porn? Maestro Waterhouse once again proves his sense for drama and half naked ladies with this piece.

Poor little St. Eulalia was just a young girl, when she was brutally tortured and than finally killed for refusing to pay homage to pagan gods. From Wikipedia:

Eulalia of Mérida was a Roman Christian child martyred in Emerita in Lusitania (modern Mérida in Spain) during the persecution of Christians in the reign of emperor Diocletian and his co-emperor Maximian. Others place her death at the time of Trajan Decius (AD 249-51).[2] There is some dispute as to whether Saint Eulalia of Barcelona, whose story is similar, is the same person.[3]

Eulalia was a devout Christian virgin, aged 12–14, whose mother sequestered her in the countryside in AD 304 because all citizens were required to avow faith in the Roman gods. Eulalia ran away to the law court of the governor Dacian at Emerita, professed herself a Christian, insulted the pagan gods and emperor Maximian, and challenged the authorities to martyr her. The judge’s attempts at flattery and bribery failed. According to the Spanish-Roman poet Prudentius of the fifth century, she said:

    Isis Apollo Venus nihil est,
    Maximianus et ipse nihil:
    illa nihil, quia factu manu;
    hic, manuum quia facta colit

    (Isis, Apollo and Venus are naught,
    Nor is Maximian anything more;
    Nothing are they, for by hand they were wrought,
    He, for of hands he the work doth adore)

She was then stripped by the soldiers, tortured with hooks and torches, and burnt at the stake, suffocating from smoke inhalation. She taunted her torturers all the while, and as she expired a dove flew out of her mouth. This frightened away the soldiers and allowed a miraculous snow to cover her nakedness, its whiteness indicating her sainthood.

Can’t wait for Mel Gibson to make another bloody movie about her.

The painting itself has an unusual symmetry, since the main subject literally falls flat on the lower third of the image. The central space is almost vacant. Compared to most other Waterhouse paintings (where the woman and the tension is located smack in the center of the image) this one requires some “looking” to realize what is actually going on.