e 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 pi