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This work came from an altarpiece dedicated to St Engracia and commissioned for the town of Daroca, in the province of Saragossa.
In the year 304 the young Portuguese noblewoman Engracia was on her way to Roussillon to meet her betrothed. Passing through the Spanish city of Saragossa, she realised that Dacian, a proconsul in the court of Emperor Diocletian, was persecuting Christians. When she reproached him for his cruelty, Dacian - portrayed on the left of the composition - subjected her to torture.
The painting reveals Bermejo's interest in three-dimensional space, suggested by means of the perspective lines of the floor tiles, the capitals and the canopy of Dacian's throne. The Roman proconsul is dressed as a Moor, a licence the painter took to convey the idea of evil to loyal Spaniards of the period. Another prominent feature is the marked naturalism of St Engracia's anatomy and of the faces of the executioner and others characters impassively witnessing the martyrdom. Bermejo was very skilled in depicting different materials, such as the marble of the columns, and the floor and the velvet of the saint's robe; on Dacian's throne he applied transparent layers of paint to a golden ground. All these skills were made possible thanks to his command of oil painting, which he no doubt learnt in Flanders.
Bermejo is prominent among those Spanish painters who fully assimilated the Flemish style and stands out, above all, as one of the most original artists of the period.
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