But to-day Lucca is like a shadowy pool hidden behind the Pisan hills,
like a forgotten oasis in the great plain at the foot of the mountains,
a pallid autumn rose, smiling subtly among the gardens that girdle her
round about with a sad garland of green, a cincture of silver, a tossing
sea of olives. However you come to her, you must pass through those
delicate ways, where always the olives whisper together, and their
million leaves, that do not mark the seasons, flutter one by one to the
ground; where the cicale die in the midst of their song, and the flowers
of Tuscany scatter the shade with the colours of their beauty. In the
midst of this half-real world, so languidly joyful, in which the sky
counts for so much, it is always with surprise you come upon the
tremendous perfect walls of this city--walls planted all round with
plane-trees, so that Lucca herself is hidden by her crown--a crown that
changes as the year changes, mourning all the winter long, but in spring
is set with living emeralds, a thousand and a thousand points of green
fire that burst into summer's own coronet of flame-like leaves, that
fades at last into the dead and sumptuous gold of autumn.
It is by Porta S. Pietro that we enter Lucca, coming by rail from
Pistoja, and from Pisa too, then crossing La Madonnina and Corso
Garibaldi by Via Nazionale, we come almost at once into Piazza Giglio,
where the old Palazzo Arnolfi stands--a building of the sixteenth
century that is now Albergo Universo. Thence by the Via del Duomo, past
S. Giovanni, we enter the Piazza S. Martino, that silent, empty square
before the Duomo. The little Church of S. Giovanni that we pass on the
way is the old cathedral, standing on the site of a pagan temple, and
rebuilt by S. Frediano in 573, after the Lombards had destroyed the
first Christian building. The present church dates, in part at least,
from the eleventh century, and the three white pillars of the nave are
from the Roman building; but the real interest of the church lies in its
Baptistery--Lombard work dug out of the earth which had covered it, the
floor set in a waved pattern of black and white marble, while in the
midst is the great square font in which the people of Lucca were
immersed for baptism. Little else remains of interest in this the most
ancient church in Lucca--only a fresco of Madonna with St. Nicholas and
others, a fifteenth-century work in the north transept, and a beautiful
window of the end of the sixteenth century in the Baptistery itself.
All that is best in Lucca, all that is sweetest and most naïve, may be
found in the beautiful Duomo, which Pope Alexander II consecrated in
1070,--Pope Alexander II, who had once been Bishop of Lucca. _Non è
finito_, the sacristan, himself one of the most delightful and simple
souls in this little forgotten city, will tell you--it is not finished;
and indeed, the alteration that was made in the church in the early part
of the fourteenth century--when the nave was lengthened and the roof
raised--was never completed; and you may still see where, through so
many centuries, that which was so well begun has awaited a second S.
Frediano.
It is, however, the façade that takes you at once by its ancient smiling
aspect, its three great unequal arches, over which, in three tiers,
various with beautiful columns, rise the open galleries we have so loved
at Pisa. Built, as it is said, in 1204 by Guidetto, much work remains
in that beautiful frontispiece to one of the most beautiful churches in
Italy that is far older than itself: the statue of S. Martino, the
patron, for instance; that labyrinth, too, on the great pier to the
right; and perhaps the acts of St. Martin carved between the doors, and
below them three reliefs of the months, where in January you see man
sitting beside the fire; in February, as is most right, fishing in the
Serchio; in March, wisely pruning his trees; in April, sowing his seed;
in May, plucking the spring flowers; in June, cutting the corn; in July,
beating it out with the flail--the flail that is used to-day in every
country place in Tuscany; in August, plucking the fruits; in September,
treading the wine-press; in October, storing the wine; in November,
ploughing; and in December, for the festa killing a pig. Over the door
to the left is the earliest work, as it is said, of Nicolò Pisano, and
beneath it an Adoration of the Magi, in which some have found the hand
of Giovanni, his son; while above the great door itself Our Lord is in
glory, with the Twelve Apostles beneath, and Madonna herself in the
midst. Not far away, to the north beside the church, the rosy Campanile
towers over Lucca, calling city and country too, to pray at dawn and at
noon and at evening.
Within, the church is of a great and simple beauty; in the form of a
Latin cross, divided into three naves by columns supporting round
arches, over which the triforium passes across the transepts, lighted by
beautiful Gothic windows: the glass is certainly dreadful, but far away
in the choir the windows are filled still with the work of the old
masters.
The most beautiful and the most wonderful treasure that the church
holds, that Lucca itself can boast of, is the great tomb in the north
transept, carved to hold for ever the beautiful Ilaria del Caretto, the
wife of Paolo Guinigi, whose tower still blossoms in the spring, since
she has sat there. It is the everlasting work of Jacopo della Quercia,
the Sienese. On her bed of marble the young Ilaria lies, like a lily
fallen on a rock of marble, and in her face is the sweet gravity of all
the springs that have gone by, and in her hand the melody of all the
songs that have been sung; her mouth seems about to speak some lovely
affirmation, and her body is a tower of ivory. Can you wonder that the
sun lingers here softly, softly, as it steps westward, or that night
creeps over her, kissing her from head to foot slowly like a lover? Who
was the vandal who robbed so great and noble a thing as this of the
relief of dancing children which was found in the Bargello in 1829, and
returned here only in 1887?
It is, however, the work of another man, a Lucchese too, that fills the
Duomo and Lucca itself with a sort, of lyric sweetness in the delicate
and almost fragile sculpture of Matteo Civitali. In the south transept
he has carved the monument to Pietro da Noceto, the pupil of Pope
Nicholas V, and close by, the tomb of Domenico Bertini, his patron,
while in the Cappella del Sacramento are two angels from his hands,
kneeling on either side the tabernacle. It was he who built the marble
parapet, all of red and white, round the choir, the pulpit, and the
Tempietto in the nave, gilded and covered with ornaments to hold the
Volto Santo, setting there the beautiful statue of St. Sebastian, which
we look at to-day with joy while we turn away from that strange and
marvellous shrine of the holy face of Jesus which we no longer care to
see. Yet one might think that crucifix strange and curious enough for a
pilgrimage, beautiful, too, as it is, with the lost beauty of an art as
subtle and lovely as the work of the Japanese. "It is really," says
Murray, "a work of the eleventh century"; but the Lucchesi will not have
it so, for they tell you that it was carved at the bidding of an angel
by Nicodemus, and that he, unable to finish his work, since his memory
was too full of the wonder of the reality, returning to it one day,
perhaps to try again, found it miraculously perfect. At his death it
passed into the hands of certain holy men, who, to escape from the fury
of the iconoclasts, hid it, till in 782 a Piedmontese bishop found it by
means of a vision, and put it aboard ship and abandoned it to the sea.
So the tale runs. Cast hither and thither in the waves, the ship at last
came ashore at Luna, where the Bishop of Lucca was staying in the
summer heat. So, led by God, he would have borne it to Lucca; but the
people of Luna, who had heard of its sanctity, objecting, it was placed
in a cart drawn by two white oxen, and, as it had been abandoned to the
sea, so now it was given to the world. But the oxen, which in fact came
from the fields of Lucca, returned thither, to the disgust of the people
of Luna, and to the great and holy joy of the Bishop of Lucca, as we may
imagine. Such is the tale; but the treasure itself is a crucifix of
cedar wood of a real and strange beauty. Whether it be European work or
Asiatic I know not, nor does it matter much, since it is beautiful.
Dante, who spent some time in Lucca, and there loved the gentle
Gentucca, whose name so fortunately chimed with that of the city, speaks
of the Volto Santo in _Inferno_, xxi. 48, when in the eighth circle of
Hell, over the lake of boiling pitch, the devils cry--
"... Qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto:
Qui si nuota altrimenti che nel Serchio."
Matteo Civitali, the one artist of importance that Lucca produced, was
born in 1435. He remains really the one artist, not of the territory of
Florence, who has worked in the manner of the fifteenth-century
sculptors of that city. His work is everywhere in Lucca,--here in the
Duomo, in S. Romano, in S. Michele, in S. Frediano, and in the Museo in
Palazzo Mansi. Certainly without the strength, the constructive ability
that sustains even the most delicate work of the Florentines, he has yet
a certain flower-like beauty, a beauty that seems ever about to pass
away, to share its life with the sunlight that ebbs so swiftly out of
the great churches where it is; and concerned as it is for the most part
with the tomb, to rob death itself of a sort of immortality, to suggest
in some faint and subtle way that death itself will pass away and be
lost, as the sun is lost at evening in the strength of the sea. The
sentiment that his work conveys to us of a beauty fragile at best, and
rather exquisite than splendid, lacks, perhaps, a certain originality
and even freshness; yet it preserves very happily just the beauty of
flowers, of the flowers that grow everywhere about his home in the
slowly closing valleys, the tender hills that lead to Castelnuovo of the
Garfagnana, to Barga above the Bagni di Lucca. More and more as you
linger in Lucca it is his work you seek out, caught by its sweetness,
its delicate and melancholy joy, its strangeness too, as though he had
desired to express some long thought-out, recondite beauty, and, half
afraid to express himself after all, had let his thoughts pass over the
marble as the wind passes over the sand between the Pineta and the sea.
It is a beauty gone while we try to apprehend it that we find in his
work, and though at last we may tire of this wayward and delicate
spirit, while we shall ever return with new joy to the great and noble
figure of the young Ilaria del Caretto or to the serene Madonna of
Ghirlandajo, hidden in the Sacristy, yet we shall find ourselves seeking
for the work of Matteo Civitali as for the first violets of the spring,
without a thought of the beauty that belongs to the roses that lord it
all the summer long.
It is a Madonna of Civitali that greets you at the corner of the most
characteristic church of Lucca, S. Michele. There, under the great
bronze S. Michele, whose wings seem to brood over the city, you come
upon that strange fantastic and yet beautiful fagade which Guidetto
built in 1188. Just Pisan work you think, but lacking a certain
simplicity and sincerity even, that you find certainly in the Duomo. But
if it be true that this fagade was built in 1188, and that the fagade of
the Duomo of Pisa was built in 1250, and even that of S. Paolo a Ripa
d'Arno there, in 1194, Guidetto's work here in Lucca is the older, and
the Pisan master has made but a difficult simplification, perhaps, of
this very work. A difficult simplification!--simplicity being really the
most difficult achievement in any art, so that though it seem so easy it
is really hard to win. Guidetto seems to have built here at S. Michele
as a sort of trial for the Duomo, which is already less like an
apparition. And if the façade of S. Michele has not the strength or
the naturalness of that, leading as it does to nothing but poverty in
the midst of which still abides a mutilated work by a great Florentine,
Fra Lippo Lippi, it is because Guidetto has gradually won to that
difficult simplicity from such a strange and fantastic dream as this.
[Illustration: THE TOMB OF THE MARTYR S. ROMANO IN S. ROMANO, LUCCA
_Matteo Civitali_
_Alinari_]
It is quite another sort of beauty we see when, passing through the
deserted, quiet streets, we come to S. Frediano, just within the Porta
S. Maria, on the north side of the city. Begun by Perharlt, the Lombard,
in 671, with the stones of the amphitheatre, whose ruins are still to be
seen hard by, it stood without the city till the great wall was built in
the twelfth century, the apse being set where formerly the great door
had stood, and the marvellously impressive fagade taking the place of
the old apse. Ruined though it be by time and restoration, that mosaic
of Our Lord amid the Apostles and Angels still surprises us with a
sudden glory, while the Campanile that rises still where of old the door
stood is one of the most beautiful in Italy. Within, the church has
suffered too from change and restoration. Once of basilical form, it is
now spoiled by the chapels that thrust themselves into the nave, but
cannot altogether hide the nobility of those ancient pillars or the
simplicity of the roof. A few beautiful ancient things may still be
found there. The font, for instance, with its rude sculptures, that has
been forsaken for a later work by Niccolò Civitali, the nephew of
Matteo; the Assumption, carved in wood by that master behind the pulpit;
the lovely reliefs of Madonna and Child with Saints, by Jacopo della
Quercia, in the Cappella del Sacramento; or the great stone which, as it
is said, S. Frediano, that Irishman, lifted into a cart.
But it is not of S. Frediano we think in this dark and splendid place,
though the stone of his miracle lies before us, but of little S. Zita,
patron of housemaids, little S. Zita of Lucca, born in 1211. "Anziani di
Santa Zita," the devil calls the elders of Lucca in the eighth circle of
Hell; but in her day, indeed, she had no such fame as that. She was
born at Montesegradi, a village of the Lucchese, and was put to service
at twelve years of age, in the family of the Fantinelli, whose house was
close to this church, where now she has a chapel to herself at the west
end of the south aisle, with a fine Annunciation of the della Robbia. To
think of it!--but in those days it was different; it would puzzle Our
Lord to find a S. Zita among our housemaids of to-day. For hear and
consider well the virtues of this pearl above price, whose daughters,
alas! are so sadly to seek while she dusts the Apostles' chairs in
heaven. She was persuaded that labour was according to the will of God,
nor did she ever harbour any complaint under contradictions, poverty,
hardships; still less did she ever entertain the least idle, inordinate,
or worldly desire! She blessed God for placing her in a station where
she was ever busy, and where she must perpetually submit her will to
that of others. "She was even very sensible of the advantages of her
state, which afforded all necessaries of life without engaging her in
anxious cares, ... she obeyed her master and mistress in all things, ...
she rose always hours before the rest of the family, ... she took care
to hear Mass every morning before she was called upon by the duties of
her station, in which she employed the whole day with such diligence and
fidelity that she seemed to be carried to them on wings, and studied to
anticipate them!" Is it any wonder her fellow-servants hated her, called
her modesty simplicity, her want of spirit servility? Ah, we know that
spirit, we know that pride, S. Zita, and for those wings that bore you,
for that thoughtfulness and care, S. Zita, we should be willing to pay
you quite an inordinate wage! Nor would your mistress to-day be
prepossessed against you as yours was, neither would your master be
"passionate," and he would see you, S. Zita, without "transports of
rage." Your biographer tells us that it is not to be conceived how much
you had continually to suffer in that situation. Unjustly despised,
overburdened, reviled, and often beaten, you never repined nor lost
patience, but always preserved the same sweetness in your countenance,
and abated nothing of your application to your duties. Moreover, you
were willing to respect your fellow-servants as your superiors. And if
you were sent on a commission a mile or two, in the greatest storms, you
set out without delay, executed your business punctually, and returned
often almost drowned, without showing any sign of murmuring. And at
last, S. Zita, they found you out, they began to treat you better, they
even thought so well of you that a single word from you would often
suffice to check the greatest transports of your master's rage; and you
would cast yourself at the feet of that terrific man, to appease him in
favour of others. And all these and more were your virgin virtues, lost,
gone, forgotten out of mind, by a world that dreams of no heavenly
housemaid save in Lucca where you lived, and where they still keep your
April festa, and lay their nosegays on your grave.
So I passed in Lucca from church to church, finding here the body of a
little saint, there the tomb of a soldier, or the monument of some dear
dead woman. In S. Francesco, that desecrated great mausoleum that lies
at the end of the Via di S. Francesco not far from the garden tower of
Paolo Guinigi, I came upon the humble grave of Castruccio Castracani. In
S. Romano, at the other end of the city behind the Palazzo Provinciale,
it was the shrine of that S. Romano who was the gaoler of S. Lorenzo I
found, a tomb with the delicate flowerlike body of the murdered saint
carved there in gilded alabaster by Matteo Civitali.
It is chiefly Civitali's work you seek in the Museo in Palazzo
Provinciale, for, fine as the work of Bartolommeo is in two pictures to
be found there, it is for something more of the country than that you
are to come to Lucca. There, in a Madonna Assunta carved in wood and
plaster, and daintily painted as it seems he loved to do, you have
perhaps the most charming work that has come from his bottega. He was
not a great sculptor, but he had seen the vineyards round about, he had
wandered in the little woods at the city gates, he had watched the dawn
run down the valleys, and the wind that plays with the olives was his
friend. He has loved all that is delicate and lovely, the wings of
angels, the hands of children, the long blown hair of St. John in his
Death of the Virgin, the eyelids that have fallen over the eyes. He is
full of grace, and his virtues seem to me to be just those which Lucca
herself possesses. Hidden away between the mountains, between the plains
and the sea, she achieved nothing, or almost nothing. Castracani for a
moment forced her into the pell-mell of awakened Italy, but with his
death, and certainly with the fall of the House of Guinigi, she returned
to herself, to her own quiet heart, which was enough for her. This one
sculptor is almost her sole contribution to Italian art, but she was
content that his works should scatter her ways, and that hidden away in
her churches his shy flowers should blossom. Civitali and S. Zita, they
are the two typical Lucchesi; they sum up a city composed of such as
Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, whom Van Eyck painted, that great
bourgeoisie which made Italy without knowing it, and, unconcerned while
the great men and the rabble fought in the wars or lost their lives in a
petty revolution, were eager only to be let alone, that they might
continue their labour and gather in wealth. And of them history is
silent, for they made her.