Sicilian Odyssey Read Online Free PDF Page A

this day, together with its reputation as a place ideally suited for the covert monitoring of its luckless inhabitants; it has also been suggested that the cave was used for less sinister purposes, to provide offstage sound effects for the nearby theater.
    During his stay in Syracuse, the painter received, with Minniti’s help, a desirable commission. The festival of St. Lucy, the city’s patron saint, was approaching, and Caravaggio was hired to do a painting for the church believed to have been built on the site of her martyrdom. The result was “The Burial of St. Lucy,” one of Caravaggio’s most powerful and original works, which has been moved from its original home in the church to the city’s Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo.
    Nothing can prepare you for the painting’s force, for the almost shocking originality of its vision and execution. It’s almost unrecognizable from reproductions, which never manage to convey its prodigious scale, or the fact that nearly two-thirds of the canvas is occupied by an expanse of threatening empty space, rendered in dark earthtones and including the suggestion of a sort of grotto or cave—a void, really—not unlike the latomie the painter visited on his tour of the ruins. What’s frequently reproduced is rarely the whole of the work, but rather a detail: the bottom third of the painting.
    The entire action—the narrative, such as it is—transpires in that lower third, where the burial is in progress. It takes a moment to locate the figures amid all that darkness, and a moment more to find the holy martyr, who is nearly hidden from the viewer.
    You have to search for the saint, the nominal subject of the painting. Because what you see first—what you can’t help seeing first—are the two gravediggers, one of whom has his broad, muscular back turned toward you. Only when you’ve looked past and around the vitality of their bodies, the luminescence of the drapery pulled diagonally across the massive buttocks of the gravedigger on the right, past the hard, brutish labor in which they are engaged—they might as well be human backhoes—only then do you see the martyred virgin, enclosed by a small circle of church officials, onlookers, and mourners, one of whom, a grief-stricken old woman, covers her face with her hands. (Like “The Crucifixion of St. Peter” in Rome, the painting reveals Caravaggio’s continuing fascination with those who did the physical work—the stoop labor—of the sacred event.)
    Fragile and pale, her lips slightly parted, lying directly on the ground, the saint (whose throat was more raggedly slashed in an earlier version of the painting, which Caravaggio modified) seems already to have become another sort of being, to belong to a whole other species than the living men and women who surround her with their harsh exertions and their painful, raw emotions. Shining from some untraceable, unidentifiable source, the light catches and plays on her upturned chin and her delicate, girlish shoulder. Everything seems to have been painted in haste (as no doubt it was), with terrific urgency and intensity. The feet of the gravediggers are sketched in, roughly indicated but unfinished, as if the artist had no interest in—no time for—such irrelevant details, though it’s also possible that this section may have been the most heavily damaged during the centuries in which the work fell into disrepair.
    In any case, what’s most striking and most unique—and what can most easily be appreciated if you compare the painting with the far more staid and conventional portrayal of the martyrdom of St. Lucy, by Caravaggio’s friend Minniti, which is also in the museum—is what’s missing, what Caravaggio has willfully, unconsciously, or instinctively chosen to leave out, to withhold. In Minniti’s rendering, both the virgin and her killer, whose knife is pointed menacingly at her throat, stare at us out of the picture; what it offers, as Caravaggio’s