is a fifth smaller than the present one, and it is conjectured that the old church, if turned the same way, would have ended near where the present pulpit stands; and there was a portico in front of it which is mentioned in some ancient MSS.
The church was certainly differently orientalized, following the symbolic formula that the choir should face the east; for the excavations disclosed part of the columns of the nave, buried under the present presbytery at the back. The circular walls of the choir were retraced in front of the present altar, and it was proved that the wall was not continued where the semi-circle of the apse opens; whereas if the church had been in the same direction it now takes, the walls would have been continued to the length of the nave.
Cav. Cordero di S. Quintino, in his Disamine su di alcuni monumenti Lucchesi, 1815, was the first to draw attention to the reversed plan of the old church, which the recent excavations have proved. He states that it was in the form of a Latin cross, had a nave, and four aisles and transepts; that its choir was at the west end, facing east, its façade on the east. It is a misfortune that its origin cannot be precisely proved, as the archives of S. Fredianus must have been burned in 1596, when the convent, with other houses, was set on fire, even if they had survived the former sacking and burning of the Ghibellines, under Uguccione della Faggiola in 1314.
Next comes Hic gloriosissimus Rex, Luitprand, who, we are told, built many Basilicæ in honour of Christ, in the places where he had his residences. He was to Lombard art what Lorenzo de' Medici was to that of the Renaissance. Luitprand was a great employer of our Comacine Masters, and very probably found them expensive luxuries, for, as we shall see in the next chapter, he was obliged to legislate to fix their prices. He even gave the length of his royal foot, as a guide to measurement.
Luitprand's foot was said to have been an extra long one, and yet, after great discussions among writers, it has at length been agreed that Luitprand's foot, and the Roman one used before it, were of the same length!
Very little, which is at all authentic, remains to us of Luitprand's churches. S. Pietro[38] in Ciel d'oro (of the golden roof), at Pavia, which was consecrated by Pope Zacharias in 743, is now a mere modern church, containing nothing but the round form of its apse to speak of its antiquity. This golden roof must refer to some mosaics originally in the tribune, and is, I believe, the first instance of mosaics being used in a Lombard church. It was built by the Christian king, "for the better reverence of the sacred remains of that great light of the church, St. Augustine, which were placed here by him." The corpse of the saint was redeemed from the Saracens in Sardinia in 743, and the relics remained in S. Pietro for ten centuries.[39] Luitprand's church, we are told, was symmetrical and graceful (grazioso). The façade was of the usual Lombard form, with a rather flat gable, and galleries beneath the eaves; it had narrow, round-arched windows, and a cross over the central one, cut deep in the stone, as we see in S. Michele in Pavia.
Basilica of S. Frediano at Lucca, 7th century.
(From a photograph by Brogi.)
The finest existing church of the Longobardic times is the Basilica of S. Michele at Pavia, which is still intact, and may be taken as the culminating point of the first Lombard style. It has all the distinctive marks of Comacine work at the period. There is the Roman form of the Latin cross with nave and two aisles divided by clustered columns supporting round arches. The walls above the central nave terminate in a sculptured string course, and over that a clerestory, the double Lombard arches of which are divided by marble colonnettes with sculptured capitals. The central nave terminates in a semi-circular apse, surrounded with pilasters and arches; beneath it is a crypt supported on two rows of columns whose capitals are covered with bizarre sculptures. The crypt is now entered by steps beneath the ones leading to the tribune, but originally it had two entrances at the sides of the tribune as in the crypt at Torcello, and that of San Zeno at Verona, which are also of the seventh century. Another particularity is in the inequality of the aisles, the left wall tending to the right, the right transept being longer and larger than the left. This is not, we are told, an accident, but one of the many symbolical forms used by the Comacines. Cordero and Vitet both refer to it. The latter says—"Souvent le plan de l'église penché de gauche à droite. Cette inclination est attribuée, comme on sait, au pieux désirs d'imiter la position du Sauveur expirant sur la croix."[40] As a whole the interior is grand and imposing, and as it stands now, retains the general plan of the original church. Some parts have been restored in the fifteenth century, especially the four principal piers which sustain the central arch, but by the difference in the work and in the sculptures we may easily distinguish the added parts. A Latin inscription in the apse, without date, proves that the great central arch of the roof and that of the choir were renewed by Bartolommeo Negri. There was a Bartolommeo Negri who was canon in 1496, but the antique style of the epitaph would point to an earlier restorer of the same name (we all know how families keep the same set of Christian names for centuries in Italy), especially as the painting in the apse is attributed to Andrino d'Edesia, who lived about 1330. Some interesting relics in the church are the circular slabs of black and green marble, now in the floor of the nave. Tradition, confirmed by Padre Romualdo, says that these were the stones on which the daïs was placed for the coronation of the Lombard kings.
Just as the interior of S. Michele at Pavia is the most perfect existing example of the classical form reduced by the Comacines to Christian use and symbolism, so is the façade as perfect a specimen of their mediæval-oriental decoration at this time as can be found. We give an illustration of it.
The Comacines at this era were perfectly sincere and their façade was always a true face to the church. The eaves with the airy gallery of colonnettes beneath them followed the exact line of the low-pitched roof. It was only when they became eclectic, and their style got mixed and over-florid, that the false fronts such as we see at Lucca came in. The inward division of nave and aisle is faithfully marked on the outside by piers or pilasters. S. Michele has four pilasters dividing it into the three portions, each one supplied with its round-arched door. In the fifteenth century the central windows were altered and a large ugly round orifice was placed above the three Lombard ones. But in 1861 they had the good taste to open the original windows, indications of whose masonry were visible in the wall, and to add the cross, deep cut in the stone, which was a distinctive feature in façades of this era. Indeed the church may be taken as a type, in all its aspects, of the Romano-Lombard building. The most remarkable part is perhaps its ornamentation, which is unique and fanciful to the highest degree. Besides the carvings on door and window, the whole façade is striped with lines of sculptured stones, a queer mixture of angels, demons, saints, and monsters, that seems a nightmare dream of mediæval superstitions, but are really a mystic Bible in stone. I shall speak more fully of this in the chapter on Lombard ornamentation.
Façade of San Michele at Pavia. Upper part restored to its original form; lower part antique. 7th century.
We must now turn for a few moments to its history, on which great uncertainty rests. Some authors say that S. Michele at Pavia was built by Constantine the Great as a thank-offering for the aid given him by that Saint in his victory over the Franks in 325; but it is possible they may have confused this church with the one which Sozomenus asserts that Constantine erected to St. Michael on the banks of the Hellespont. Other writers, of whom Malaspina is one, claim it as an Ostrogoth foundation; others again, finding a suspicion of Arianism in the sculpture of the Annunciation on the south side of the church, assign it to Agilulf before his conversion from Arianism; while Gabriel Rosa, author of Storia dei feudi e dei comuni in Lombardia, attributes it to King Grimoald.
This last, however, is disproved by one of Paulus Diaconus' curious stories. He says "that in A.D. 661, King Bertharis being in peril of his life by the usurper Grimoald, was saved by his faithful servant