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The picture has been much abraded by time, but its power and originality are undimmed. The strong illusion of reality is all the more impressive given the painter’s bold distortions of scale and perspective. Clustered behind the body of the saint, a small group of mourners has gathered. Their faces and bodies are seen in fragments, occluded by shadow and the body of the first gravedigger, forming a collage of griefstruck response. To the right of the priest’s blessing hand, a man’s face has been abbreviated to little more than a furrowed brow and a pair of staring, anxious eyes; this may be a daringly cropped self-portrait. To the left, three more saddened faces appear. A bald man prepares to wipe tears from his eyes. Beside him, the much repainted figure of a woman stares impassively into space, while, between them, their bearded companion seems frozen by melancholy. At the feet of these three figures, Caravaggio has included a kneeling reprise of the old woman with her face in her hands from his recent altarpiece of The Beheading of St John.

The mourners are completed by a young man draped in a snaking length of red cloth, and a veiled elderly woman. His hands are clasped in front of him, at waist height, while hers are held up to her cheek. Both stare down with intense grief at the dead body on the ground in front of them. These last two mourners have been taken directly from the conventions of earlier Renaissance painting, in which Mary and the Apostle John were depicted in exactly the same postures of grief. Caravaggio’s use of this deliberate archaism evokes the Crucifixion and emphasizes the martyr’s emulation of Christ. The wound in her neck and her outstretched left arm reinforce this chain of associations.

The picture has a hallucinogenic quality, the feeling again of a work painted from memory rather than from models. Just as the old woman with her head in her hands has been borrowed from Caravaggio’s earlier Beheading of St John, the sinister figure in armour standing next to the blessing bishop is another version of Aegeas in The Crucifixion of St Andrew, painted in Naples in 1607. More than ever, Caravaggio’s painting evokes the old, folk traditions of Italian polychrome sculpture. Lucy and those who mourn, bury and bless her could almost be mannequins of wax, dressed in real clothing and given real hair. The tall, bare room in which the burial takes place evokes the simple chapels of the old sacro monte, where stories of the life of Christ are told through assemblages of straining and struggling figures very much like these.

The artist may have drawn on older memories too. When plague had struck Milan in 1576 he would have seen many hasty burials and ragged funeral processions. The picture’s iconography is ingeniously suggestive of hope and redemption, but its mood is overwhelmingly bleak. No angel descends to hymn the martyr’s soul to heaven. Almost half the painting is dark bare stone, wall and arch both isolating and seeming to press down on the figures crowded around the dead body. The snapshot immediacy of the image, with its extremely innovative effects of cropping and occlusion, is suggestive of alienation and abandonment. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Manet and Degas began to crop and cut their images in the name of capturing ‘modern life’, would there be anything to rival Caravaggio’s weird dislocations in The Burial of St Lucy. The bishop and soldier, pushed to one side by the scything asymmetry of the composition, remain deeply ambiguous. Officially they stand for good and evil, light and dark, the compassionate Christian as opposed to the ruthless pagan response to a martyr’s death. But they have been so brusquely sidelined by the artist that it is tempting to wonder whether he was opening the way to another view of what they might embody. Church and state stand by, united in their ineffectiveness, as yet another innocent goes to the grave.

Perhaps with the priorities of the Senate of Syracuse in mind, Caravaggio also included