Santa Lucia! "every dead thing, in whom Love wrought new alchemy"

Linda Sue and her Orphans reminded me it's Saint Lucy's Day today!
Her orphans are doing the Scandinavian tradition, with head wreaths and candles. (And cardmom rolls, while on the Feast of Santa Lucia, Italians eat some untasty-looking dish of boiled wheat with ricotta.)

I've made St. Lucys in past years, with her Italian martyr iconography––(she was from Catania, Sicily)––but I wasn't really tracking this year....

I've always looked to the painting of Lucia with her eyes on a stalk, like flowers, but this year I had baby doll eyes, too heavy to put on a stalk, so I wanted to do one with her eyes on a plate (the more common iconography).
As I looked through images, I saw the statue that is processed in Italy every year has the sword in her neck--the instrument of her martyrdom. (Being blinded didn't kill her--her eyes miraculously were restored.)

I just happened to have a metal sword on hand--picked up at the store for Judith to chop off Holofernes's head! (I think it's really for cocktails?)
Few paintings show Lucy with her eyes on plate and a sword in neck, but some do. I did both. Should have made a crown too, but there are limits to how much I can do at the kitchen table at any one time.

The girlette (this is Franca) looks suitably triumphant--martyred saints often look quite pleased with themselves. "I win!"

I relate to the violent beauty of the images. Knee on a neck? Needle in a vein? Bullet to the brain? There it is, horror and cruelty all mixed up with love and mercy and grace.

Brew it all up in paint and plaster---it's art! I love it.

Besides Saint Lucy in art, I love John Donne's poem, "A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day".

"I am every dead thing,
         In whom Love wrought new alchemy."

It's about his love for his wife, who has died, but that line is suitable for martyred saints too. Or people who feel down in the deep dark, and then the light starts to return. Magic!