The stake is raging. Saint Lucia of Syracuse is martyred under the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian for his conversion to Christianity, his resistance irritates: a witness jumps on the pole and cuts his throat.
The bodies twist, turn over in all directions; the smoke rises in dense spirals, taking with it the vaporous fabric of the dress. The violence of the scene explodes in the effects of glimpses and perspectives, in the virtuosity and in the chromatic contrasts.
Born from the Counter-Reformation, which reaffirmed the importance of the cult of saints, Baroque art showed its splendor in religious circles. In 1621 Rubens made the ceiling for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, which was largely lost in a fire in 1718. The preparatory sketches allow us to imagine it today.
This work on wood was born from an important commission received by Rubens in 1620, in which the painter undertook to create in less than a year a series of paintings to adorn the ceiling of this church, built starting in 1615. The contract he specifies that he had to "draw the drawings of the 39 paintings in small format with his own hand, then leaving the final execution to Van Dyck and some other students" from his studio. This model, a sketch painted in oil, assumes all its value: by the hand of the master himself, he illustrates his genius and testifies to what his contemporaries called "the agility and frenzy of his brush".
© Musée des beaux-arts de Quimper.
Title: The martyrdom of Saint Lucia
Author: Peter Paul Rubens
Date: About 1620
Technique: Oil on the table
Displayed in: Quimper Museum of Fine Arts
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