430 APPENDIX, 8

sculpture; there is no inlaying, except of some variegated tiles in the shape of saucers set concave (an ornament used also very gracefully in St. Jacopo of Bologna); and the whole surface of the church is enriched with the massy reliefs, well preserved everywhere above the reach of human animals, but utterly destroyed to some five or six feet from the ground; worn away into large cellular hollows and caverns, some almost deep enough to render the walls unsafe, entirely owing to the uses to which the recesses of the church are dedicated by the refined and high-minded Italians. But St. Michele of Lucca is wrought entirely in white marble and green serpentine; there is hardly any relieved sculpture except in the capitals of the shafts and cornices, and all the designs of wall ornament are inlaid with exquisite precision-white on dark ground; the ground being cut out and filled with serpentine, the figures left in solid marble. The designs of the Pavian church are encrusted on the walls; of the Lucchese, incorporated with them; small portions of real sculpture being introduced exactly where the eye, after its rest on the flatness of the wall, will take most delight in the piece of substantial form. The entire arrangement is perfect beyond all praise, and the morbid restlessness of the old designs is now appeased. Geometry seems to have acted as a febrifuge, for beautiful geometrical designs are introduced amidst the tumult of the hunt; and there is no more seeing double, nor ghastly monstrosity of conception; no more ending of everything in something else; no more disputing for spare legs among bewildered bodies; no more setting on of heads wrong side foremost. The fragments have come together: we are out of the Inferno with its weeping down the spine; we are in the fair hunting-fields of the Lucchese mountains (though they had their tears also),-with horse, and hound, and hawk; and merry blast of the trumpet.-Very strange creatures to be hunted, in all truth; but still creatures with a single head, and that on their shoulders, which is exactly the last place in the Pavian church where a head is to be looked for.

My good friend Mr. Cockerell wonders, in one of his lectures, why I give so much praise to this “crazy front of Lucca.”¹ But it is not crazy; not by any means. Altogether sober, in comparison with the early Lombard work, or with our Norman. Crazy in one sense it is: utterly neglected, to the breaking of its old stout heart; the venomous nights and salt frosts of the Maremma winters have their way with it-“Poor Tom’s a cold!”² The weeds that feed on the marsh air have twisted themselves into its crannies; the polished fragments of serpentine are split and rent out of their cells, and lie in green ruins along its ledges; the salt sea winds have eaten away the fair shafting of its star window into a skeleton of crumbling rays. It cannot stand much longer; may Heaven only, in its benignity, preserve it from restoration, and the sands of the Serchio give it honourable grave.³

In the Seven Lamps, Plate VI., I gave a faithful drawing of one of its upper arches, to which I must refer the reader; for there is a marked piece

¹ [Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863), R.A., was Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy 1840-1857, but his lectures were not printed. In one of these he must have referred to the Seven Lamps and the praise there given to San Michele, Lucca (see Vol. VIII. p. 185).]

² [King Lear, iv. 1.]

³ [The prayer was not granted; the church was restored into “a mere architect’s copy” in 1862: see Vol. III. 206 n.]

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