The picture is first unambiguously recorded in 1723 as above the door to the campanile in the church of Santa Croce, Belluno (see Provenance). This is unlikely, however, to have been its original position, and it was probably painted for the side wall of the nearby chapel of Saint Lucy, to complement an altarpiece consisting of a triptych of gilded wooden statues. The displacement of Veronese’s painting was probably necessitated by the commission of the local Bellunese painter Giovanni Fossa (1645–1732) to decorate the chapel with a new scene of the saint’s martyrdom, probably in fresco. The circumstances of Veronese’s commission are undocumented, but the body responsible for supervising the extensive redecoration of the church in the late 16th century, often employing painters from Venice, was a leading local devotional confraternity, the Compagnia della Croce. The likelihood that the Compagnia played a major role in the commission is confirmed by Carlo Ridolfi, who listed among Veronese’s works “E per la Compagnia della Croce di Ciuidale la figure di Santa Lucia” (And for the Compagnia della Croce in Cividale [di Belluno] the figure of Saint Lucy).
Saint Lucy was a virgin martyr of Syracuse, who was put to death at the beginning of the 4th century during the persecutions of the emperor Diocletian. According to the account of her life given in the Golden Legend, numerous unsuccessful attempts were made to force her to abjure her Christian faith. Whole teams of oxen were unable to drag her to a brothel. In exasperation, the Roman governor commanded that she be burned at the stake, but before this could happen, one of his henchmen plunged his sword into her throat. She remained alive long enough for a priest to arrive to administer the last rites. While alluding to the episodes of the burning and the oxen in the sketchily executed background, and including on the far left the half-cropped figure of Lucy’s mother, Eutychia, Veronese conflated in the right foreground the two aspects of the story that would have been of particular interest to post-Tridentine religion: Lucy’s martyrdom and her reception of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Even as she sacrifices her life for the love of Christ, she is seen accepting that the soul’s salvation is achieved only through the sacraments of the Catholic Church; while the executioner bends over her almost tenderly to perform his brutal task, she gazes in tearful rapture at the Eucharistic wafer. As pointed out by Beverly Brown, Veronese’s affective emphasis on the redemptive power of the Eucharist may have been inspired by the description of Lucy’s martyrdom in Lorenzo Surio’s De Probatis Sanctorum Historiis, published in Venice in 1575. But as Brown also noted, Surio said that the executioner stabbed the saint in the abdomen, whereas Veronese, adapting the iconography of Saint Justina, showed her being stabbed in the breast.
The picture is not dated, but ever since its first public display at the Italian Art and Britain exhibition in 1960, there has been general agreement that it is an autograph work of high quality, datable to the last decade of Veronese’s life, between circa 1582 and his death in 1588. Analyzing the x-radiographs [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] X-radiograph, Veronese, The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucy, c. 1585/1586, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund and the pentimenti they reveal, Brown has drawn attention the spontaneity of the design process. Rodolfo Pallucchini, Alessandro Ballarin, and Brown have dated the picture to the earlier part of the decade, to circa 1580/1582, whereas Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, as well as W. R. Rearick, have seen it as a very late work of circa 1585/1586. In favor of the latter dating is the dusky color range and the picture’s very close stylistic similarity to the documented Miracle of Saint Pantaleon of 1587 (San Pantalon, Venice), in which a vested priest similarly ministers to a suffering victim with deep compassion.
Brown has noted two early copies, both probably dating from the earlier 17th century: one, a small oval on panel, in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, formerly in the monastery of San Michele in Isola; and the other, larger and less faithful, in an English private collection. Brown also traced the inspiration of the painting on later Venetian painters, such as Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Peter Humfrey
March 21, 2019
