“...  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.