Yuletide Saints: Saint Lucy
Yuletide Saints Saint Lucy The second of my Christmas season saint paintings is St Lucy or Santa Lucia. The feast of St Lucy is December 13. This painting and my St Nicholas painting share a rectangular metallic-toned border, but different in color, tone, and framing. Saint Lucy, or Santa Lucia, was a Sicilian martyr. In her hagiographic tradition Lucy was punished for rejecting a pagan bridegroom by defilement in a brothel. In later legend her resistance to the betrothal was also met by having her eyes gouged out. She is shown in medieval art and elsewhere blinded and, as shown in the painting, holding her eyes in a cup, but her vision was miraculously restored. Her association with vision and light is corollary to the presumed derivation of her name from the Latin lux , light. The coincidence of her feast day, December 13, with the Christmas season, and its proximity to the winter solstice and its association with Nordic pag...