tch, 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. Mi