Saint Lucy

Jacopo Torriti was a Roman mosaic artist and painter active in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, best known for the magnificent apse mosaics he executed for Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome under Pope Nicholas IV. His Saint Lucy panel belongs to the rare survivals of his work as a panel painter alongside his monumental mosaic practice. Lucy — the Sicilian virgin martyr of the Diocletianic persecution — was among the most widely venerated female saints in medieval Italy, invoked for protection of eyesight. Torriti's panel reflects the late Byzantine-Roman tradition at the moment just before Cimabue and Giotto's naturalist revolution.

Torriti employs the Byzantine-Roman panel tradition: egg tempera over gesso on panel with gold ground. The saint is rendered in the frontal Byzantine manner with gold-hatched drapery (chrysography) and the hieratic proportions of the Italo-Byzantine tradition. Lucy's attribute — her eyes on a plate, added to her iconography to explain her name — is rendered with the direct, symbol-readable clarity of the pre-naturalist devotional tradition.