I just finished an essay that feels freestanding and that could fit in three places in my Sea of Intimacy. I can’t tell whether its potential multifarious placement is a good thing or not.
“Looking for Lucy” begins in Split, Croatia, where a sign that says “Lucy” hangs outside the cathedral (once the mausoleum of Diocletian) and points around the corner. There’s a crypt but no Lucy.
So I set out to find her, following the saint from her home in Syracuse, Sicily, where she was martyred in the fourth century CE, under Diocletian, to Constantinople, where she was taken “for protection” in the 9th century, and then to Venice, where she was transported (some would say with a lot of other stolen items) in the 13th century.
As the patron of vision, she’s often depicted with more than one pair of eyes, especially in Renaissance paintings like the one I’ve put here by Francesco del Cossa (c. 1473), where the idea of looking at her as she looks at us looking at her seems to frequently be on the artist’s mind. Then there is the fact of her translation, again and again, by powerful men. A bit like she was martyred.
On my last trip to Venice, I noticed from a vaporetto—I must have seen it before but had not fully registered what it was—the inscription on the side of the church of Saint Jeremiah. It says here lies Lucy, let her light shine forth. Something to that effect anyway.
So I went looking for her. The essay’s out looking for a publisher now.
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Russell Scott Valentino 