Burying Lucy
Most visitors to Syracuse stick to Ortygia, the tear-shaped island that was the original site of the Greek colony, and Neapolis, with its large Greek theatre and sculptured caves. The Basilica di Santa Lucia is slightly off the beaten track, and few visitors were there last week.
When you’ve been used to the elaborate Baroque churches of Sicily – often, like Welsh chapels, with the external architectural fantasy confined to the façade – this Franciscan church, built in around 1100, comes as a welcome relief. Its plain, arcaded side faces a large piazza. Close by stands the octagonal chapel of San Sepolcro, where the bones of St Lucia were kept before they were purloined by the Venetians.
You can’t walk far in the city without coming across St Lucy, its patron saint. The story goes that a disappointed lover denounced her as a Christian, at the time of Diocletian’s persecution, in the year 304 CE. A judge convicted her and ordered that she should be dragged to a brothel. But nothing could move her from where she stood, not even a team of oxen. Finally she was murdered, with a sword blow to her throat.
Most of the visual images of Lucy show her alive or at the point of death. But when Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a Lucy picture to go above the altar in the Basilica in 1608, he chose a different, and rarer scene, the burial of the saint. (A man of considerable anger and aggression, he’d arrived in the city after escaping from Malta, where he’d been imprisoned for an unknown violent offence.)
It’s how Caravaggio treats his chosen theme, though, that marks his picture out as powerful and unusual. Dead Lucy lies prostrate on the earth. Her neck bears the slash of the sword that killed her, but her face is placid and she holds out her foreshortened towards us. Around her are grouped an ascending line of mourners, including a bishop, and buttressed by a figure of military authority. At a lower level, an older woman is the only mourner showing signs of real distress.
These immobile people are dwarfed by the two vigorous figures in the foreground, the two gravediggers. Caravaggio, always an admirer of the male body, takes great care to reproduce their tensed muscles and grim faces, using the chiaroscuro skills for which he was famous to contrast the light and dark parts of their bodies and scant clothes. These are two working class giants, accustomed to hard manual labour. They attack the soil with force. The right-hand one ignores Lucy and the mourners, the other pauses for a moment to glance at them – whether in sympathy or contempt, it’s hard to tell. They may be ruffians, but you have the feeling that Caravaggio can’t help relishing their bodies. His placing of the two figures adds to the power of the composition: their heads, forearms and extended front legs combine to make a rough circle, bound around the miniscule Lucy in the centre.
There’s another way in which Caravaggio ‘belittles’ the mourning scene. All the figures are overshadowed by the huge, plain cavernous space that surrounds them. Some think that the location is one of the great limestone caves that border Neapolis, carved out in ancient times for building stone – and as prisons, notably for Athenian prisoners captured in 413 BCE after the calamity of the ‘Sicilian Expedition’. Caravaggio, a keen antiquarian, is known to have visited them while in Syracuse, and may even have named the most impressive of them ‘The Ear of Dionysius’. More plausibly, he was inspired by the Christian catacombs of the city. Those beneath the Basilica feature round-headed arches of the kind shown in the painting.
Having completed such an unconventional painting, Caravaggio, still on the run, didn’t wait for its unveiling on Lucy’s feast day, 13 December, but fled to Naples. His picture has wandered around Syracuse since, but is now restored, and happily returned to its original home.
By the way, if you’ve been to Syracuse and its caves, I’d strongly recommend reading the Irish writer Ferdia Lennon’s recent novel Glorious exploits, set in the city in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat. Two Syracusan friends – they speak with contemporary Dublin accents – hit on a plan to stage two recent plays by Euripides, using those cave-imprisoned Athenians who could remember the lines.