Since 2020, the first and perhaps most important of the paintings Caravaggio created in Sicily, The Burial of Santa Lucia, has been displayed above the main altar of the Church of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro. The 1608 work is, unfortunately, in a poor state of conservation, but is nonetheless essential to understanding the final two years of the painter’s life and work. Caravaggio had escaped from prison in Malta, where he had been jailed following his involvement in a fight in August, two days before the unveiling of his The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, planned for the saint’s feast day. According to Ferdinando Bologna, the Santa Lucia painting was commissioned by the erudite “Galilean” Vincenzo Mirabella, who will be briefly discussed in the next few pages with regard to his expertise as a scholar of Syracusan antiquities.
In this fundamental work, the level of brutality of the two gravediggers’ actions is differentiated: the man on the right carries out his orders obediently, with mindless callousness, while the one on the left lifts his gaze and, in so doing, generates the trajectory of the painting’s real subject: the scene of sorrow at the saint’s death. Among the crying women, the bishops blessing the burial, and the faces of an anonymous, “dissolving” crowd is a boy with his hands folded, dressed in a red so bright as to chromatically dominate the entire painting. The martyr’s body seems that of a Shakespearean heroine—an Ophelia or a Juliet—who has suffered for love, more than lived to be sanctified; though her flesh may be putrefied, her bearing is all the more dignified in death.
Caravaggio appears to have next moved on to Messina, and there, in the Resurrection of Lazarus he painted soon after, he continued to isolate the torment and shock of figures witnessing death or miracles in augmented spaces. The artist’s stay in Sicily may also have been facilitated by the presence in Syracuse of Mario Minniti, the pupil usually identified as being constantly at Caravaggio’s side since his early years in Rome, including decidedly tumultuous periods. Minniti, Syracusan born, returned to his home city around 1606 and stayed there, aside from short periods away, until his death in 1640. It fell to him to take up Caravaggio’s mantle in eastern Sicily, and in the last years of his life he created paintings that played up dramatic effects produced by harsh, violent light, revealed in all their powerful theatricality.
