L'Enterrement de sainte Lucie

Caravaggio painted this in the autumn of 1608, and he painted it as a fugitive. He had fled Rome after killing a man, joined the Knights of Malta, then been thrown into a cell on Malta for a fresh brawl, and by early October he had escaped and slipped across to Syracuse in Sicily. An old friend from his Roman years, the painter Mario Minniti, helped him land this commission from the city, an altarpiece for their patron saint, Lucy, who according to tradition was martyred in Syracuse. He made it fast, in a few precious weeks under the protection of the men who had hired him. Look at how much of the canvas he gives to bare, brownish wall, with the mourners pushed down into the lower band and Lucy's small body laid flat on the ground. Two huge gravediggers loom in the front, their backs to us, digging. It is his largest surviving canvas. He would keep moving through Sicily and never make it back to Rome. The painting still stands in Syracuse, in the church of Santa Lucia alla Badia.