Saint Lucy

This elegant lady is Saint Lucy. She once stood on the Virgin’s left in a small altarpiece which Crivelli painted for a side chapel in the church of San Domenico, in Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marche. At once sinuous and solid, she is the counterpart of Saint Michael who would have stood at the other end of the polyptych. Lucy’s aristocratic pallor, golden locks and fine outfit all echo his, down to the green, pink and gold of her cloak which falls in weighty folds around her feet. Even the decoration of the parapet below her, where boughs of pears grow out the ears of a curly-headed putto, recalls the ears and head of Satan in the Michael panel.In a detail typical of Crivelli, her elongated, bony toes in their pointed red sandals poke out over the edge of the marble parapet on which she stands, linking her heavenly space with ours. Her upturned gaze would originally have rested on the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the centre of the altarpiece.Lucy holds her cactus-like martyr’s palm in one hand and a circular wooden plate it other. On this rests a pair of hooded, oval eyes, looking disconcertingly like chocolates; they cast oval shadows on the golden wood. According to her legend, Lucy was a Christian convert in third-century Rome, whose mother tried to force her into marriage with a pagan. She refused, having decided to dedicate her life to Christ, and so her frustrated bridegroom denounced her to the authorities. The Roman governor sentenced Lucy to forced prostitution as punishment, but when the guards came to carry out her sentence, the Holy Ghost made her body so heavy it was impossible to lift. She was then put to death after having her eyes removed. She is now the patron saint of opticians.Although she lived in the third century, Lucy is dressed as a fashionable fifteenth-century lady. She wears a gold jacket embroidered with flowers and foliage, with a broad gold collar and elaborate clasps of raised and gilded pastiglia. The fastenings down the front have been left open to reveal her linen shift. She wears a necklace of pearls, symbols of chastity, from which hangs a ruby pendant. Her hair is pulled back from her high forehead – as was the fashion at the time – and wound in elaborate curls around a circlet of pearls. On her head is a veil so transparent as to be almost invisible. Her smart red sandals are an antiquarian detail: Crivelli has included them as a nod to the kind of sandals worn in ancient Rome.