Holy Face of Lucca - History

History

The year 742 marks the arrival of the Volto Santo in the Basilica di San Frediano; its transferral to the cathedral, justified by a miraculous translation in the Latin legend, De inventione, revelatione ac translatione Sanctissimi Vultus may be connected with the episcopacy of Anselmo da Baggio (1060–70), who presented it at the consecration of the new Romanesque cathedral, 6 October 1070. Insistent details of the hagiographic legend (see below) also suggest that the image had previously been at Luni in Liguria, the former see of a bishopric and the early commercial rival of Lucca. Luni was a Byzantine possession that had been sacked by Saracens, disputed between Byzantines and Lombards, and reduced to a village by the eighth century. The sculpture bears no stylistic relationship to Lombard sculpture of the tenth or eleventh century, however. The iconography of a completely robed crucified Christ wearing a colobium— an ankle-length tunic— is more familiar in the East than in the West, although a near life-size Crucifixion, carved in the round, is contrary to Byzantine norms. Life-size crucified Christs were more common in Germany from the late eleventh century, following the Gero Cross of Cologne Cathedral of about 970, which seems to have been the prototype. The long robe may be a Byzantine influence, although many Western examples also exist, in Ottonian illuminated manuscripts and other media. The belt of the Volto Santo is unprecedented in a Crucifixion from either East or West.

In Lucca, an annual candlelit procession, the Luminara, is devoted to the Volto Santo on 13 September, the eve of religious celebrations on the following day. The procession, which today no longer includes the sculpture as in the past, walks to the cathedral from the Basilica of San Frediano, where a fresco cycle commemorates the legend of Nicodemus' sculpting the image from cedar of Lebanon, during which, having completed all but the face, Nicodemus slept, awaking to find the Holy Face completed by an angel. In Eastern Christianity, similar legends accrue round icons said to be acheiropoieta, "not made by human hands". Discovered in a cave in the Holy Land by "Bishop Gualfredo", who was guided by a revelatory dream, the image was carried first to the Tuscan port of Luni in a boat without sails or crew. But the men of Luni, when they tried to board the boat, found that it retreated miraculously from their grasp. Warned by an angel in a revelatory dream that the Volto Santo had arrived in Luni, Johannes, bishop of Lucca, with his clerics and a great crowd of Lucchesi, arrived at Luni, bid a stop to the attempts to retrieve the boat and, by calling upon God, found that the ship came miraculously to Johannes and opened to him its gangplank. When the people saw the Volto Santo they wept tears of joy and cried Gloria in excelsis Once ashore, the legend brings the image to Lucca in a cart pulled by oxen with no driver, in a further miraculous demonstration of the "rightness" of its possession by the city of Lucca, and having been deposited in the church of San Frediano, it is miraculously translated to the church of San Martino, which was interpreted as the rationale for choosing this church as the cathedral. Thus the possession of the image by Lucca rather than Luni, and its location in its rightful church, were both justified by legend.

Its popularity was expressed in copies as well as legends, to satisfy the pilgrims who made the cathedral of Lucca the goal of their voyages from all parts of Europe. "By the face of Lucca" was the 'customary oath' of William II of England.

The present Volto Santo itself is an early thirteenth-century copy of the original ascribed to the circle of Benedetto Antelami. It appears that the original was chipped away beyond repair by relic-seeking pilgrims. The earliest copies date from the early twelfth century, which may suggest that the original in fact dates only from the 11th century. Its presence in Lucca can only be securely documented from about 1100, although Abbot Leofstan of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, who died in 1065, recorded that the inspiration for a life-size crucifix he had made for Bury St Edmunds was one he saw at Lucca on his way to Rome. Copies of a similar size from the 12th century are found widely spread across Europe. These include the Cross of Imervard in the Brunswick Cathedral at Braunschweig, Germany, the Volto Santo of Sansepolcro at Sansepolcro, Italy and possibly the Batlló Crucifix of Barcelona, Catalonia.

At the end of the fourteenth century, such a Holy Face inspired miracles and veneration in the Low Countries, Bavaria and the Tyrol, though its connection with Lucca had been forgotten. The long robe appeared to signify a woman, and to account for the beard, a saint was supposed, who, in order to maintain her virginity against the wishes of her father that she marry a king of Sicily, was granted a miraculous beard, rendering her unmarriageable, upon which occasion her father had her crucified. This saint assumed various local names: Sankt Wilgefortis or Kümmernis in Germany or Sainte Débarras in France, and was duly entered in the Martyrologium Romanum in 1583, retaining a devoted following as late as the nineteenth century.