Saint Lucy

This painting of Saint Lucy was part of a bier commissioned from Domenico Beccafumi in 1521 by the Compagnia dei Santi Niccolò e Lucia in Siena. These biers were funeral beds used to transport the bodies of the deceased from the church to the cemetery. In Siena and its territory, painted biers were particularly popular; the panels at the head and foot were painted on both sides with sacred images. The bier of the Company of Saints Nicholas and Lucy remained in use until 1624, when it was donated to Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany. From that moment trace is lost of the individual panels, only one of which – the one depicting Saint Lucy – survives to testify to our day the very high artistic quality which must have marked the original complex.

The young saint is presented to the devotion of the faithful with the attributes which have characterized her iconography through the centuries. In her right hand she has a dagger, the instrument of her martyrdom, and in her left she holds a glass stand on which are placed two eyes, symbols referring to her particular torture. The work of one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance and Mannerism, this Saint Lucy enables us to follow the development of the phase in Beccafumi’s artistic itinerary that marks the passage from his early training on the examples provided by Raphael toward the acquisition of a more fantastically inventive language, tending to a free, imaginative interpretation of the figurative canons of the Renaissance which marked the artist’s maturity. The graceful, classically balanced pose with the harmonious counterposition of the saint’s limbs is combined with a liquid handling of the paint that dissolves the forms and lights up the composition with shrill notes and restless gleams of light.