Acting upon the words of the saint in the vision, he found at once the lost tomb, and when the coffin of cypress wood was opened, the body of Cecilia was seen unchanged, still wrapped in the gold-embroidered robe in which she had been clothed when her loving friends laid her to rest after her martyrdom, with the linen cloths stained with her blood folded together at her feet. She lay in the position in which she had passed away. Those who had buried her, left her thus--not lying upon the back like a body in a tomb, but upon the right side, with her knees drawn together and her face turned away--her arms stretched out before her. In her touching and graceful attitude she seemed as though she was quietly sleeping. Just as he found her, in the same coffin with the robe of golden tissue and the blood-stained linen folded by her feet, Pope Paschal reverently deposited her in a crypt beneath the altar of her church in the Trastevere district, simply covering the body with a thin veil of silk. Nearly eight hundred years after (A.D. 1599), Sfondrati, titular Cardinal of the Church, while carrying out some works of restoration and repair in this ancient Church of S. Cecilia, came upon a large crypt under the high altar. In the crypt were two ancient marble sarcophagi. Responsible witnesses were summoned, and in their presence the sarcophagi were carefully opened. In one of these the body of S. Cecilia lay just as it had been seen eight centuries before by Pope Paschal I--in the same pathetic attitude, robed in gold tissue with the linen cloths blood-stained at her feet. Every care was taken by the reigning Pope Clement VIII to provide careful witnesses of this strange discovery; among these were the famous scholars Cardinal Baronius and Bosio; the greatest artist of the day, Stefano Maderno, was summoned to view the dead saint and to execute the beautiful marble portrait which now lies in the recess of the Confession beneath the high altar of the well-known church in the Trastevere at Rome. In an inscription, Maderno, the artist, tells how he saw Cecilia lying incorrupt and unchanged in her tomb, and how in the marble he has represented the saint just as he saw her.[134]