Lucy

When I thought about Santa Lucia, which was not very often until a few days ago, I thought first of how she appears in vaguely Scandinavian illustrations from children’s books and Christmas cards with:; part angel, part Christmas tree, she is a figure of innocence, wearing crown of candles on her blonde curls. In Tasha Tudor’s illustrations, she cavorts with corgis and cats. This Lucy in her white dress is not the patron saint of Syracuse. She is not the martyr whom her torturers attempted and failed to set alight after they tried and failed to drag her to a brothel. She is not the woman who gauged out her own eyes, the one so often represented in Renaissance art holding out  her eyeballs on a plate or in a cup.  She is not the victim who finally succumbed to having her throat cut. She is not even the heroine who rescued Christians from the catacombs, encircling her head with candles so she should see to help them escape.

This blonde, childlike creature is also not Caravaggio’s Santa Lucia. Five years ago, on our first trip to Sicily and to Syracuse, we made our way, as tourists do, to the small church of Santa Lucia alla Badia,  quite literally in the shadow of the city’s magnificent Duomo. At the time this was where Caravaggio’s “The Burial of St Lucy” was displayed, although the painting has since moved back its original home in a different church dedicated to the saint. In our many attempts to enter the church—it was closed for many hours every day—we spoke not of Saint Lucy or Santa Lucia, but of Caravaggio. When on our very last day in the area we finally got to see the painting, it was Caravaggio we saw and remembered when we planned a return visit.  This is in part because Lucy is in some ways strangely absent from the painting of her final moments. Her body, arrested in the act of her burial, is in large part obscured by the bulky male figures that surround her. Their highly individualized faces are picked out by the same light that settles, , on and somehow obscures Lucia’s chin. More prominent than Lucia herself, or than her wailing mother, is the imposing figure of a gravedigger, whose heft produces at least in me a sort of gravitational pull, drawing the eye past the recumbent figure to the right bottom corner of the frame. The energy and power of his shoulder muscles, painstakingly rendered, contrast with an almost half-hearted representation of Lucy’s head and upper torso, devoid not only of motion but of detail. For us, at that moment, the church was a museum and not a shrine.

Our return to Santa Lucia alla Badia on this, our second trip, already had us thinking of Lucy, as we came to call her, in a different way. We had paused in our second tour of the Duomo to look closely at the statue of the saint in the aisle of the cathedral. Although we had heard the story of her  martyrdom, which began with her refusal to marry and her dedication to a life of charitable work,  there was something about the statue, at least for me, that dispelled, perhaps for the last time, the Christmas cards, the corgis and the ruffles, although not quite the blonde curls which tumbled their way in marble over the statue’s shoulders. The bas relief at the base of the statue tells the narrative of her martyrdom. The first and least worn panel depicts Lucy being dragged by outsize oxen to the infamous brothel. That part of the story, where Lucy becomes miraculously too heavy to be moved, gave me, looking up at the statue, a new sense of her own heft and stature. The middle panel depicts the pyre on which Lucy was supposed to die, the wood that, miraculously again, refused to burn. These failed instruments of torture put the statue of Lucy into conversation with the image to her left of another female martyr, St Catherine, who, it is said, caused the wheel on which she was supposed to be tortured to stop turning. Christmas card Lucy, was replaced in my mind by a figure of female resistance to sexual violence, a figure of remarkable weight most suitably rendered in stone and not in watercolor or even oil.

In our tour of the cathedral, Lucia changed yet again. On the opposite side of the sanctuary from the statue, there is a chapel dedicated to her. It features a painting that catches her in her characteristic pose, one arm outstretched, seemingly offering the spectator a cup containing her gouged-out eyes. As in many paintings of Lucy, the grotesque nature of the offering is belied by the calmness and indeed sweetness of her face, whose presumed disfigurement is never visually rendered. It is not only the eyes that haunt this chapel; like many such places across the Catholic world, this space dedicated to a particular saint also includes a relic. Lucy’s left humerus bone is incorporated into an ornate altar. What was most striking about the chapel, though was what was not there; a large silver statue of Lucia, which the audio guide seemed to indicate was hidden behind bronze doors that I could also not locate, despite switching from Italian to English and from the oral to written guides. I left feeling that I had perhaps once again missed seeing Lucia.

It was in a “secret” exhibition next door, between the Duomo and the church, that (I say this by way both of cliché and understatement) the statue and Lucy came to life. An extra two euros bought us a visit to the archbishop’s palace and his library. Among the dignified liturgical artifacts in gold and silver, and homier—and tackier—shadow boxes featuring cloth or plastic images of the baby Jesus, was a monitor that looped a video of the 2014  Festival of St Lucy. We caught it, at first, in medias res, as two Italian tourists watched and commented. “Eccola!” said the woman. “There she is!” “She” was the enormous silver statue of Lucy, on wheels, emerging for the occasion from behind the bronze doors onto the Piazza and into wildly appreciative nighttime crowds. The statue’s journey out of the church was not entirely a smooth one; silver Lucy was pulled, with the occasional jerk, along a set of tracks by men with long ropes. Every once in a while, even when she was out in the streets, the statue would seem to shudder. It is hard to say whether, at least on film, this made her seem more alive or more mechanical. The statue itself if you saw it in a museum or a chapel might strike you as garish, even slightly ridiculous. A massive silver body, topped with a delicately painted face. A gilt dagger stuck through her neck. A pair of wide-open blue eyes, not really to scale, stuck to the hem of her silver gown. But there she was, and she had dignity if not grace, moving regally through her city. bulky

Our last piece of Lucia tourism was another sort of revisitation. After many hours at Syracuse’s archeology museum on the other side of the bridge from the Duomo, we were miraculously (and I might mean this) able to find a parking space just outside the Caravaggio’s new home in Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, that marks the site of her final martyrdom. The church used to house her bones, but these too were moved, first to Constantinople--as it was then--and then to Venice. The Caravaggio has been placed on top of the main altar, far enough away from visitors that Lucy is even more indistinct than she was in the more intimate arrangements of Santa Lucia in Badio. This time, I did not look at the painting for very long, instead turning to another statue, this one painted on a pillar indicating the exact place that Lucy died. I found that I preferred painted Lucy to the Lucy of the painting.

As I finish this entry to the blog, I feel I must say something about names and pronouns. I find myself using different versions of the saint’s name Lucy, Lucia, Santa Lucia, Christmas Lucy, Silver Lucy, Painted Lucy.  I have not been strictly consistent with my usage, choosing and marking the name that made sense in my changing relation to her and to her story. I have also not been entirely consistent with the use of “I” and “we.” Although I have throughout the blog experimented with the first person singular, the third person, and even the second person, I don’t think I have so far used “we” in a sustained way. I use it here to reflect the reality that this journey in search of Lucy was undertaken in the company of my husband, Scott. But the switch to the first person singular early in the entry reflects something that I have thought and written about for a long time: the conjunction of what I have called the “conjugal gaze” and the touristic gaze. In my book, Victorian Honeymoons, I argue that nineteenth-century honeymoon travel, when successful—and it often was not—worked to fuse the perspectives of the bride and groom as they became “one flesh.” The dominant gaze was often the husband’s, as he introduced the wife to scenery and art that he had already seen or read about. In the diaries and letters of honeymooning couples I read for the book, the happiest brides and grooms used “we” when describing how they looked at a painting, a building, or a mountain. I was aware of my somewhat different use of the conjugal gaze in my own journey which was neither Victorian nor a honeymoon, but a trip taken in 2023 after more than 35 years of marriage. Scott and I looked for and at Lucy together, shared a desire to see more of her, to track her down. But of course, we looked at Lucy—all the Lucys—with different eyes.