Saint Ricarda (c. 840-c. 895) was the wife of Charles the Fat, emperor of the Carolingian Empire from 881 to 887. Charles’s reign was rocky at best. His archchancellor, Liutward, was accruing too much power, and his marriage to Ricarda was childless. When Charles began to lose his mind, Ricarda stepped in as regent. Charles wasn’t having it: he accused Ricarda of having an affair with Liutward and requested a dissolution of his marriage, saying that it had never been consummated. Ricarda’s faithfulness was put to trial by fire. She passed and was fully exonerated by a papal commission that declared her a virgin. Withdrawing from the court, she found refuge at Andlau Abbey, which she had founded in 880 on her ancestral Alsatian lands.
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Leonhard Beck shows Ricarda full-length, her body engulfed in flame and her head surrounded by a flaming aureole. He made it as part of an unrealized project for Emperor Maximilian I, who hoped to publish a Hapsburg family genealogy built around the saints to whom he was related.
