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By Root 1287 0

Burial of St Lucy, the final episode in the story of her martyrdom and one seldom painted. There was a logic behind the choice. The civic and religious authorities of Syracuse were especially keen to reinforce the local cult of St Lucy, which had been severely damaged by the theft of the saint’s remains during the Middle Ages. Rival cults of Lucy had been established elsewhere, most notably in Venice, where ownership of her relics was now being claimed. The authorities wanted Caravaggio’s picture to remind the world that wherever her bones might have been taken, Syracuse was the original site of Lucy’s miracles and the place where she had first been laid to rest.

The fullest account of her martyrdom is to be found in The Golden Legend. Lucy, a virgin of noble lineage, born in Syracuse, resolved to imitate the poverty and humility of Christ. She swore a vow of chastity and steadily gave away her possessions to the poor. Her former husband-to-be, a non-believer, failed at first to realize that she had converted to Christianity and suspected her of courting another man with her wealth. When she informed him that she was now a bride of Christ, he denounced her to a Roman judge named Paschasius. The judge punished the saint by giving her over to ‘the ribalds of the town’, instructing them ‘to defoul her, and labour her so much till she be dead’. But when they came to take her away to a brothel, they could not move her. Paschasius sent for reinforcements, even for a team of oxen, but ‘she abode always still as a mountain, without moving.’ Then the judge ordered a great fire to be lit around her immobile form, commanding his torturers to pour boiling oil and resin on her. Throughout her ordeal, she prayed to God, so infuriating her tormentors that they thrust a sword straight through her throat. Even then she did not die, or even budge an inch, until Holy Communion was offered to her: ‘Lucy never removed from the place where she was hurt with the sword, and died not till the priest came and brought the blessed body of our Lord Jesu Christ. And as soon as she had received the blessed sacrament she rendered up and gave her soul to God, thanking and praising him of all his goodness. In that same place is a church edified in the name of her …’

Caravaggio painted the moment just after St Lucy received communion and died. Having breathed out her soul, she lies on a bare expanse of ground. Her body is small, crumpled, pathetic. Her right arm is outstretched, the foreshortened hand reaching out like the hand of a beggar asking for charity. The other arm rests on her belly. Lucy’s skin is pallid with death, her mouth slack. Her head lolls helplessly back. There is a deep gash in her neck, but no sign of burns. Her frail body is framed by the hulking figures of two gravediggers, stooping to plunge their spades into the earth. The contrast between the slight saint and the giants who have come to bury her is extreme and disconcerting. This was Caravaggio’s way of continuing to suggest the brutality of Lucy’s martyrdom – the death of a young woman at the hands of thuggish men – even in the moment of her burial.

The bull-necked, crop-haired gravedigger to the right, whose tightly draped buttocks have been given such rude prominence, is loutishly absorbed in his task. Were he to stand up, he would tower over all the other figures in the painting. He is a man-mountain, at least ten feet tall. His workmate is similarly gigantic but more aware of his surroundings. Veins bulge in the left forearm and right wrist, but, as he bends to dig, he loses concentration on the job in hand. He seems transfixed by the figure of the bishop, to the right of the scene, whose blessing hand is picked out by a ray of illumination. The toiling worker has suddenly become aware of the momentous, sacred nature of the ritual in which he is taking part. According to her legend, in her last moments Lucy had expressed the hope that her martyrdom might convert some of her tormentors to Christianity. In the figure of the second gravedigger, that hope is about to be realized.