St. Lucy and Kneeling Donor

Lazzaro Bastiani's St Lucy and Kneeling Donor, painted around 1485 and now in the Portland Art Museum, depicts the early Christian martyr Lucy of Syracuse — patron saint of the blind and of light, whose very name derives from the Latin lux — beside the kneeling figure of the unknown patron who commissioned the work as a personal act of devotion. Lucy was among the most invoked of early Christian martyrs in late medieval Italian devotion, her feast on December 13th falling at the time of the winter solstice and her legendary martyrdom — including the miraculous preservation of her eyes — making her a potent intercessor. Bastiani was a Venetian painter of the generation that witnessed the transformation of Venetian painting by Giovanni Bellini, and his work for provincial patrons carried Venetian coloristic warmth to ecclesiastical and private commissions across the Veneto. The donor portrait, a Flemish-derived convention, individualizes an otherwise anonymous act of piety.

Bastiani presents the saint in three-quarter figure with the attributes of her martyrdom, while the kneeling donor at her feet is rendered at a slightly diminished scale in the Flemish devotional portrait convention. The warm Venetian palette and the saint's composed elegance are characteristic of Bastiani's careful provincial classicism.