The Holy Face of Lucca

Summary

IT is a familiar fact that William Rufus liked to swear by the Holy Face — the Vultus Sanctus or Volto Santo — of Lucca. We have Eadmer’s word for it: * ‘By the Holy Face of Lucca’, for thus he was wont to swear, ‘neither he at this time, nor anyone else, shall be archbishop — except myself.’ ’ The king is reported to have used the oath on several other occasions.

Rufus’s oaths immediately prove one thing. By the late eleventh century an object knowo as the Vultus Sanctus of Lucca was sufficiently celebrated to be invoked by the king of a far country, striking testimony to its fame even if it is acknowledged that in this age of the Norman expansion, the great pilgrimages and the First Crusade, England and Italy were joined by a thousand threads, and Englishmen, or Anglo-Normans, frequently took the road to Rome that led via Lucca, What then was the Vultus Sanctus?

That the object by which Rufus swore was the Romanesque wooden crucifix which today stands in the cathedral of San Martino at Lucca cannot be definitely proved, although it has often been assumed to be so. According to one view, the present Volto Santo is a copy, of late twelfth or early thirteenth-century date, of a more ancient original, although it is not beyond possibility that it is of the eleventh century. It seems a reasonable working assumption that Rufus’s Vultus closely resembled the present one; however, the question why a cross should come to be called a face, which we shall see seemed to the author of the twelfth-century legend of the Vultus to require an explanation, has bothered some scholars sufficiently to prompt the suggestion that the original Vultus, or the first object to be venerated under that name, was not a crucifix, but a Veronica or sudarium, to which the term ‘face’ might have been more appropriately applied, This, it seems to me, is to multiply hypotheses unnecessarily. Certainly there are strong indications, as I hope to be able to show, that the object which probably came to be venerated at Lucca at some point in the latter half of the eleventh century, and which by the end of the century had acquired the popular name ‘Vultus’, was a cross.