Lucy, Saint

(d. 304)

   The daughter of noble parents from Syracuse, Sicily, St. Lucy refused to marry one of her suitors who, in retaliation, denounced her as a Christian to Governor Paschasius. She was sentenced to a brothel but, when guards attempted to take her there, they could not move her. Then, she was ordered to die at the stake, but the flames did not harm her. In the end she was stabbed successfully in the throat. Saint Lucy is the patron saint of eye ailments as she supposedly tore out her own eyes to give to a suitor who admired them, but these were miraculously restored. Another version of her life story claims that the tearing out of her eyes was part of her martyrdom. The saint figures in the St. Lucy Altarpiece by Domenico Veneziano (c. 1445-1447, Florence, Uffizi), with her martyrdom by stabbing on thepredella (now in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie). Lorenzo Lotto painted St. Lucy before the Judge (1532; Jesi, Pinacoteca Comunale) and Caravaggio rendered her burial (1608; Syracuse, Museo Bellomo). One of the most aesthetically pleasing representations of the saint is by Francisco de Zurbarán (c. 1635-1640; Chartres, Musée des Beaux-Arts), painted for the Monastery of the Merced Descalza in Seville, Spain.