Matteo Civitali was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 sculptor and architect, painter and engineer from Lucca

Lucca

Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...

. He was a leading artistic personality of the Early Renaissance in Lucca

Lucca

Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...

, where he was born and where most of his work remains. He was trained in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, where Antonio Rossellino

Antonio Rossellino

Antonio Gamberelli , nicknamed Antonio Rossellino for the colour of his hair, was an Italian sculptor. His older brother, from whom he received his formal training, was the painter Bernardo Rossellino....

 and Mino da Fiesole

Mino da Fiesole

Mino da Fiesole , also known as Mino di Giovanni, was an Italian sculptor from Poppi, Tuscany. He is noted for his portrait busts.-Career:...

 influenced his mature style. He is known to have sculpted statues of Adam, Eve, Abraham, Saints Zacchariah and Elizabeth, and others for the chapel of San Giovanni Battista in Genoa Cathedral. He is mentioned with the name of Matteo Civitali by Vasari in his biography of Jacopo della Quercia

Jacopo della Quercia

Jacopo della Quercia was an Italian sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, a contemporary of Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Donatello. He is considered a precursor of Michelangelo.-Biography:...

, and appears to have taken up the art of sculpture at the age of 40 years, after years of practicing as a "barber" (surgeon).

His free-standing chapel, the "tempietto", built in 1484 to enshrine the Holy Face of Lucca

Holy Face of Lucca

The Holy Face of Lucca is a venerated wooden corpus of a crucifix, located in the free-standing octagonal Carrara marble chapel , which was built in 1484 by Matteo Civitali, the sculptor-architect of Lucca, to contain it. The tempietto stands in the right-hand nave of the cathedral of San...

, stands in the left nave of the Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca

Duomo di San Martino

The Cathedral of St Martin is a church in Lucca, Italy. It was begun in 1063 by Bishop Anselm .-Description:Of the original structure, the great apse with its tall columnar arcades and the fine campanile remain...

. The Duomo contains also a virtual anthology of Matteo's sculpture, since he worked at the San Romano Altar, and also sculpted the S.Sebastian in the back of the Holy Face Shrine, and two monumental graves in the right transept.
Matteo Civitali died October 12, 1501. The relief of Faith (now in the National Museum of Florence, Italy) was originally the first segment part of Hope and Love, a triple relief.This marble figure of Faith was acquired by the Uffizi Gallery in 1830 from the prior of a church at Paterno near Florence. This piece of work existed in the church of Saint Michele in Lucca.