I never paid much attention to them until I thought about how much time my beloved symbol spent in their company. In addition to Saint Lucy, 17 additional paintings hang in Gallery 13. After ascending the monumental steps that face the National Mall, to find Saint Lucy one must pass through the majestic central marble dome / oculus, stride west along a great corridor and then turn north, zigzagging through a warren of increasingly smaller rooms until arriving at Gallery 13 labeled, ‘North Italian Painting of the Late 15 th Century’. I soon began making regular trips to visit her.

I found the image online and discovered it was in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

The logo for my website is a detail from one of the earliest paintings of Saint Lucy which presents a regal Lucy holding a stem of a flower whose buds have been replaced by two eyes. Lucy acknowledges darkness and the coming of light.ĭetail, Saint Lucy by Francesco del Cossa, tempera on panel, 1477 / 1478 I remembered all those plates full of eyes: Lux, lucid, Lucy in the Sky, Camera Lucida, even. I was reading Maggie Nelson’s compelling meditation on the meaning of the color blue – Bluets – in which she invokes the legend of Saint Lucy. I would stay up late into the night purchasing numerous lame domain names (‘Luminous Flux’ anyone?). In Swedish villages her feast day is celebrated with processions in which the youngest girl of each household wears a headdress of candles.ĭuring the summer of 2010, when I was thinking about launching a website for writing about photography (mostly), I made lists of possible names, ‘Light Box’, ‘Caja de Luz’, ‘Incidental Light’ and many of which were unavailable. Her feast day is December 13, which in the Julian calendar was thought to be the shortest day of the year. She is often portrayed in religious paintings holding a golden plate upon which her eyes rest. Saint Lucy is the patron saint of the blind, of eye disorders and the protector of sight. Another version of the story has Lucy taking out her own eyes to offer them to her would-be husband who thought them beautiful. She suffered numerous tortures including having her eyes gouged out. Sentenced to be defiled in a brothel, legend has it that when the nobleman’s guards came to take her away she was immovable as a mountain. Saint Lucy was a young Sicilian Christian living in the third century who was martyred when she refused to marry a pagan nobleman. Her name derives from the Latin word for light – Lux. But the work itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched. To become involved in a work of art entails, to be sure, the experiencing of detaching oneself from the world.

Lucy in my eyes