Scholarly Article

Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century: The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucy, c. 1585/1586

Part of Online Edition: Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century

Publication History

Published online

A man stabs a woman, Saint Lucy, in the chest while another man, a priest, holds a gold cup and offers her a small white wafer in this horizontal painting. Two man flank the priest, and the group is in front of a town square. Saint Lucy has pale skin and the men have tanned skin. In the center, Saint Lucy faces us and kneels with her body angled to our right. She turns her head away from us and toward the communion wafer with hermouth slightly open. Her copper-red hair is pulled back under a golden-brown cloth, which falls over her shoulders. The bodice of her thistle-purple gown has been pulled down, and blood trickles from the dagger held there. Her long sleeves are lined at the cuffs with white ruffles, and her skirt puddles on the ground. The gown has a sheen, suggesting satin or silk. She holds one hand down by her side, palm facing us, and holds up the gold cloth by her chest with the other. The man with the dagger is to our left. He hunches over Saint Lucy, stepping onto his front foot from behind her shoulder. He has dark hair, and his face is in shadow. His white shirt and butterscotch-yellow clothing expose the muscular shoulder of the stabbing arm. His pants end at the shin, and his feet are bare. To our right, the priest is balding with a white beard. His face is lined as he looks down at Saint Lucy, his head tipped toward us. He wears a white robe with a gold stole. A man wearing celestial blue and holding a thick candle kneels facing away from us between us and the priest. Another man wearing red and plum purple looks at Saint Lucy from under dark, lowered brows on the far side of the priest. Across from this group, a sixth person edges into the scene from our left, so only their profile, a shoulder, and a hand are visible. Deep in shadows, they seem to look into the town square. That space is lined with tall stone buildings to our right and an arch on the far side. A few people and oxen gather around a woman wearing pink, who stands on a platform in the square. Two more people sit atop a platform above the woman, flanking an upward shooting pink stream, like a wide ribbon. Thin white and gray clouds veil the shadowy, marine-blue sky in the upper left quadrant.
Veronese, The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucy, c. 1585/1586, oil on canvas, Gift of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1984.28.1

Entry

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 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.

Technical Summary

The picture is painted on a plain-weave, medium-weight fabric, consisting of three pieces, the largest of which is joined to the two smaller ones along a horizontal seam running approximately 39 centimeters above the lower edge. A vertical seam in Saint Lucy’s robe joins the two smaller pieces of fabric. The painting has been lined, and although the original tacking margins are now missing, it appears to be close to its original dimensions. The paint was applied fluidly over an off-white preparation, thinly in the darker areas, more thickly in the light colors, and more thickly still in the highlights. The x-radiographs show extensive pentimenti as in the positions of Saint Lucy’s head and outstretched hand, in the hand of the kneeling figure, in the area above Lucy’s cap, in the architecture above the executioner’s head, in the man in the background sitting on the well, and elsewhere. There are several old tears in the original fabric support; the most prevalent ones are located in Saint Lucy’s neck, in the head and scarf of the left-most figure, and in the blue garment of the kneeling figure. The surface is somewhat abraded, and the thinly painted architecture has darkened, in a way that compromises the spatial relationship of foreground to background. The painting was treated in 1982 before it entered the collection.

Peter Humfrey and Joanna Dunn based on the examination report by Jia-sun Tsang

March 21, 2019