The Pala d'Oro started out as a relatively modest silver panel commissioned by doge Pietro Orseolo in 976-978 A.D. It was expanded by doge Ordelafo Falier (1104), and over the centuries it grew into this ponderous rectangle 11.4 feet (3.5 meters) long and 6.8 feet (2.1 meters) high.
I can tell you precisely when was the last time I sat and looked at art. It was Easter morning, and I wasn’t in a museum.
We were sitting in the front row of the basilica of San Marco and the occasion was the elaborate festal mass. The sermon was well underway. I had had every intention of listening carefully, because it was the new patriarch’s maiden voyage and I had been curious to check his rigging and navigation skills on one of the biggest days of the year.
If you’d like to know more, you’ll need to ask someone else. Because while he didn’t drift into uncharted political or theological waters (I’m finished with this metaphor now), as his predecessor used to do, he wanted to convey a message I couldn’t follow, and he was in no hurry to finish it. It was the religious equivalent of the stationary bicycle.
To be fair, he could just as well have been reading the Government Printing Office Style Manual, because the basilica of San Marco is an Olympics-level competitor if you’re trying to get somebody’s attention. So I made the most of being installed in my seat for a while, and let my eyes wander around the opulence of the basilica itself. And where my eyes wander, my brain tends to follow.
The story of Christ's temptations is presented in its barest essentials, but nothing has been left out, up to and including Satan giving up and flying back down to Hell.
I love this lion. He's just one small part of the gleaming mosaics on the ceiling and walls, which cover about 86,000 square feet (8,000 sq/m). I'm convinced that Venetian mothers for centuries implored their daughters to marry a mosaicist. They'd have been fixed for life.
After scanning my usual favorites (the mosaic depicting the Temptation in the Wilderness, the bug-eyed lion of San Marco in the Prophets Cupola, the relief on the small marble altar outlining Saint Paul’s crisis on the road to Damascus), I let my eyes settle on the Pala d’Oro.
One usually has to pay a small fee to go behind the high altar to see this prodigy, but on major feast days it is rotated to face the nave. Of course, when you’re seated out there you can’t discern much detail, but even from a distance you can tell it’s something phenomenal.
As I gazed at it, I let my eyes slide beyond the extravagant assortment of enamel medallions, and the myriad (1,927, actually) precious and semi-precious stones, and its gleaming golden surface, dazzling though it all may be.
What I saw were the hundreds of people involved in making it, and how hard the work was, and how much it cost. I don’t mean the bills that were presented to various doges, or what its total price would be today in round dollars, if such a thing could be calculated, which it probably can’t.
I mean the money every single person earned who was involved in this project, bearing in mind that what we see is the result of additions, substitutions, and renovations over centuries. If thinking of Accounts Payable seems crass, it probably wasn’t so crass to the artists who made it. Art is many things, but toward the top of the list is the word “business.” I doubt that any more than .0035 percent of all the art in the world was made for free.
The number of individuals who contributed to this prodigious creation is similarly difficult to calculate, along with their vast amount of skill, effort, and imagination. So let’s take just one person.
I’m thinking about a master enamelist. First, there are the years he spends as an apprentice, doing the scut work, making mistakes, throwing things out, learning little tricks, getting yelled at. He learns how to work with wire, with glass, with color, with fire. After I don’t know how long, he ‘s good enough to get the commission to do five saints (let’s say).
So he goes home to give his wife the good news, and tells her how much he’s going to be paid (and when!). And they stay up late feeling happy and trying to decide how they’ll spend the money — finally buy that horse? Pay the butcher? Order their daughter’s wedding dress?
Then I thought the same things about the artist who applied the baroque pearls (years, labor, etc.). Then I stepped back one step to the merchants who sold and bought the pearls (years, labor). And the person who brought the pearls from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople. And the person who dived for the pearls. (I stopped short of imagining the oyster making the pearls, but you’re free to go ahead.)
Then I thought about the gold-leaf beaters and appliers. (This is no small thought, considering that the Pala d’Oro consists of gold in many forms: repousse’, cast, applique’, chased, stamped, matted, and filigrees, not to mention granulation and beading.) The gold merchant. His wife and kids. The camel-driver and ship’s captain who carried the gold. Their wives and kids. The gold miner. His wife and kids.
The central medallion depicts "Christ Pantocrator," a classic Orthodox/Byzantine depiction of Christ as the Almighty, or Ruler of All. This piece alone would have kept a number of people busy.
So I probably missed an excellent sermon while I was imagining spouses and offspring and extra food and new shoes and sick grandfathers and quack doctors and on and on, through the whole infinitely expanding intricacy of the connections between just about everything.
So whenever I see a few square inches of art (frescoes, mosaics, marble statues, kilim carpets, whatever), I sometimes unleash my mind and let it roll around like a Weazel Ball among centuries and countries and people.
I came back to my immediate surroundings when they passed to take up the collection. Speaking of money.
So the goldsmith comes home and his wife asks how his day went, and he says "Excellent -- I finished the wings. Tomorrow, the seraphim." I deduce that this is an image of Ariel, one of 12 archangels represented in the throng. The garment is reminiscent of the Byzantine emperor's robes.
April 25 is here again, one of the bigger days in the Venetian calendar. Its importance is in inverse relationship to the ceremonial recognition of it, which is modest to the point of near-invisibility.
A long-stemmed red rose (the “bocolo”) and a scattering of fresh laurel wreaths leaning against important municipal monuments are about the only signs of anything different about today. Lovely, but small.
This year, however, a special significance joins the memory of San Marco and of the liberation of Italy in 1945.
One hundred years ago today, the campanile of San Marco was inaugurated — that is, the reconstructed tower which had collapsed at 9:53 AM on July 14, 1902.
The bells are rung every July 14 at 9:53 AM. It has nothing to do with Bastille Day. The ringing commemorates the fall of the tower, and the one surviving bell, the "marangona," is still going strong.
The city was justifiably proud of having rebuilt its most visible monument as it had vowed to do: “Com’era e dov’era” — as it was and where it was. And in a mere ten years, too. Not bad, considering that they had had to work on the foundation, cast four new bells, repair the pavement of the Piazza, and sift tons of wreckage to recover any bits that were reusable. And it may well be the only public work which was not undertaken to the accompaniment of “no ghe xe schei.”
The history of this belltower is — like most things here — very interesting and very complicated. The version we see today was constructed in 1511, the last in a line of ever-heightening towers on that spot which had served as lighthouse, lookout point, and bell-bearing structure. Every church has its bells somewhere nearby, and the basilica of San Marco has this monolith. Whether or not you think it’s beautiful or appropriate (naturally opinions swarm all over the place), it is undeniably the guardian of Venice. “El paron’ de casa,” as it is known more familiarly — the head of the house.
You’d have to be a real campanile or Venice maniac, though, to have read anything of the story of why it fell down and what was involved in putting it back on its feet. The Gazzettino recently put out a little book to commemorate this centennial which briefly but comprehensively describes the phases of this history.
If nothing else, the fall and rise of the campanile of San Marco stands as yet another monument to political and bureaucratic misfeasance. Because while the city can be justly proud of its accomplishment in rebuilding it, a dark, thick veil of silence covers the reasons for why it happened in the first place. As in: It shouldn’t have happened at all.
Here is a rapid review. The campanile had suffered almost every kind of damage over the centuries — earthquakes, fires caused by lightning strikes, general wear and tear — and had undergone more restorations than Joan Rivers.
But with the arrival of modernity, more things were done which a 400-year-building weighing around 13,207 tons (11,981,224 kilos) wasn’t able to withstand. Such as the cutting of a hole in the brick wall big enough to get the caretaker’s new stove in.
The tower was constantly monitored, but opinions of what was happening and what to do clashed on a regular basis. In the months leading up to the disaster, all sorts of ominous signs were seen, till the largest fissure went all the way up to the top and was widening by the day. The dangers were obvious even to the naked, ignorant eye of your average passerby.
While discussions continued (the eternal confrontation between the “bail! bail!” party and the “row faster!” party), a cordon was placed around the tower to keep the public at a safe distance.
On July 13, some of the technical experts — engineers! architects! — were still proclaiming that there was no danger of collapse, but recommending further study.
At 4:00 AM on the morning of July 14, a worried Luigi Vendrasco, the master mason, came to the Piazza. He could see that the deterioration was increasing at a noticeable rate. At 5:30 came Domenico Rupolo, the architect in charge of the works. Together they rushed to Pietro Saccardo, the overseer of the basilica of San Marco. They all headed for the Prefect, where they were joined by Federico Brechet, director of the Regional Office for the Conservation of Monuments, and Alberto Torri of the Civil Engineers.
Brechet and Torri wanted to go up the campanile for a closer examination, but Rupolo talked them out of it. I’m guessing they sent him a big gift basket every Christmas for the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile, a passing journalist asked a policeman stationed as a guard in the Piazza for any news. The policeman replied, “Mi digo che nopassa sinque minuti e casca zoso tuto.” (I’d say that in less than five minutes the whole thing is going to fall down.) He called it.
At 9:30 the shops on the south side of the Piazza were ordered closed, and the Piazza was cleared out. At 9:47 pieces of stone began to fall. At 9:53, the whole thing went down with a dark, heavy roar, raising a cloud of dust of Biblical proportions.
"The Campanile was demolished by the imperizia of the government engineers," the Gazzettino's headline read. "Imperizia" is somewhere between fecklessness and incompetence.
“What is there to marvel at?” raged Luigi Vendrasco, the master mason who had been pleading for years for immediate and correct intervention to prevent this very occurrence, creating so many enemies that he lost his job. “It fell? I’ve been saying this for ten years! I’ve been amazed that it hasn’t happened sooner. And then, it hasn’t ‘fallen’ — they threw it down and it obeyed!… Without a doubt the campanile could have been saved, if since 1892 certain things had been done and certain other things hadn’t been done. Even in these last few days, if, instead of putting on lots of monitoring devices on a wound that even a blind person could see, that that wound had been directly addressed. The final and determining cause of the breakdown was the cut at the base for the work on the Loggetta di Sansovino.”
He was referring to the little job undertaken in early July to replace the lead roof of the Loggetta, which was attached to the campanile facing the basilica. To prevent rain from filtering into the bricks, an overhanging slab of an undefined material had been inserted into the campanile.
Removing the roof meant removing this protecting protrusion, and the workmen got right on it. They intended to replace it immediately, but for some reason this never happened. What remained, therefore, was a cut stretching nearly the entire width of the campanile facing the basilica, a channel 11-15 inches (30 -40 cm) deep and 25 inches (40 cm) high. Instead of jamming something hard into the space to balance the tower’s weight, this slash just sat there.
There is a little game kids used to play at the beach — maybe they still do — called the “gioco della polenta.” You make a big mound of wet sand. Then each of you in turn c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y removes a handful of the sand from the base of the mound. The object is to not be the person whose handful causes the whole thing to cave in.
The mayor said the collapse of the campanile had been unforeseeable. He must never have gone to the beach.
The beautiful thing is that you can see the campanile from everywhere. It's strangely reassuring. There were people, however, who immediately said that the Piazza was more beautiful without it.
I’m guessing you haven’t been giving much thought to ship caulking lately. Probably about as much thought as you haven’t given to San Foca — a point you share with most Earth-dwellers. I can help you with this.
San Foca is the patron saint of caulkers, hence he is also the patron of The Societa’ di Mutuo Soccorso fra Carpentieri e Calafati: The Society of Mutual Aid between Carpenters and Caulkers.
I can’t say there’s much work for either of these categories here anymore — certainly not as much as there was when the Venetian Republic was in full cry. But these craftsmen were always near the top of the food chain, considering that Venetian power was essentially naval. A statement to this effect was recorded in the Venetian Senate, for what reason I know not, on July 13, 1487 (translated by me): “… carpenters and caulkers, have been at all times the most appreciated and accepted on the galleys and other of our ships because in every need of any sort these men are the most adapted and necessary of any other kind of man.” Considering the wear and tear a Venetian ship was likely to undergo in its life, especially after cannon began to be used, your caulker would have been up there with the navigator and the cook as far as the well-being and probable safe return of the crew were concerned.
Glimpse of a battle under the ramparts of Zara (now Zadar) Croatia, from the facade of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio. Just to give an idea of how useful it was to have a carpenter and/or caulker aboard.The Society's standard, brought out for the occasion.
If you’re still not convinced that caulking is such a big deal, consider how much, as the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. An example: On the night before a certain battle, which I’m not going to pause to look up just now, the Venetian admiral was pondering the odds for winning the imminent battle with the unpleasantly superior Turkish fleet. Hope for the best? Or just send a batch of men at night to swim under the Turkish ships and rip out the caulking sealing the planks of their hulls? Dawn broke to what must have been a quiet but busy sound from the Turkish bilges, something like blub-blub-blub….
Back to the mutual aid society. March 5 is San Foca’s feast day, so he was celebrated at a special mass in honor of him as well as the departed members of the sodality. And then, naturally, there was a party. You’ve heard it before: “All the psalms end with the ‘Gloria.'”
The church was full, something you don't see every day.
Seeing that I am a newly fledged (or whatever the ship-caulking counterpart might be) member of the SMSCC, Lino and I went to join in.
The ceremony was in the church of San Martino, which is right under the haunch of the Arsenal, and which is full of assorted tokens of carpentering and caulking. There was nothing especially noteworthy about the mass, except for the unusually large number of people attending. And the party followed tradition in its simplest and clearest outlines: People! Noise! A small, hot room crammed with loud, hungry humans and vats of Venetian food!
I don’t know if San Foca had a favorite dish, but I’m always going to associate him with tripe soup. An ancient and honorable comestible which deserves a wider audience and which I’d bet money you would like as long as you didn’t know what it was.
And I think next year we should all plan to hold the party in Calafat, Romania. It was founded by caulkers from Genoa, but I suppose we could overlook that for the sake of harmony. I’m going to get to work on the convoy’s banners: “Calafat or Bust.”
The priest blesses the gift packets containing a candle, an image of San Foca, and a small bread roll. The painting over the altar depicts the Holy Family with San Marco and San Foca.
My gift packet. The image of San Foca is from the basilica of San Marco. I suppose he is depicted hefting a rudder rather than a bag of dumb irons and a couple of mallets because, as patron saint of seafarers in general, it was thought best not to show favoritism to any particular craft.Symbols of caulkers' tools in the main aisle of the church of San Martino.
We eat! Of COURSE we can all fit into the tiny room of the parish hall. Where's the food?Keep that tripe soup coming.
Just the thing on a cold winter night. Be lavish with the grated parmesan, even if it isn't pasta.
The soup keeps you going till they bring out the bigoli in salsa. Or you can just keep snacking on peanuts, pickles, beans, salame sandwiches...
A satisfyingly dim view of the panorama as we headed to church. This is the very least the weather should be doing for this holiday.
Yesterday one of the most important days in the Venetian (hence in my) calendar came around again: the annual feast of La Madonna della Salute, Our Lady of Health.
Health is one of those things, like air or the ability to speak your mother tongue, that you don’t give much thought to till it’s been impaired. Or removed.
In a city that has the highest median age of any city in Italy, health is a subject that’s right up there on the short list of things to really worry about, several places ahead of acqua alta and even a close second to tourism. Considering that the city government is currently debating (or not — I can’t keep track) whether to close the hospital here and send everybody who needs help to the big hospital on the mainland (pause for screams of rage and disbelief), health is clearly a big issue.
The sign is put up every year: "It is dangerous to lean out when passing under the votive bridge." Those who don't speak Italian probably discover this fact on their own.
But let us return to the health at hand. This feast was established in 1630 in thanksgiving for the Madonna’s response to the desperate plea of the city of Venice for deliverance from arguably the worst plague in its history, though the pestilence of 1574 was also noticeably catastrophic.
If anyone (such as me) has ever tried to imagine what an epidemic of plague might entail, a few passages from “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni might help. They certainly provide a way to grasp the magnitude of this festa (not to mention the votive church, which took 50 years to build).
The votive bridge, made of a few bits of the big bridge that's installed for the feast of the Redentore (another plague situation). Highly useful for pedestrians but a large pain for transport, which is one of many reasons why it isn't permanent.
The plague of 1630 exterminated much of northern Italy, and drawing on contemporary documents, Manzoni describes the plague in Milan. I presume that it was much the same in Venice, where 80,000 Venetians died, including the doge, though here the carts obviously were replaced by boats.
…sickness and deaths began rapidly to multiply…with the unusual accompaniments of spasms, palpitation, lethargy, delirium, and those fatal symptoms, livid spots and sores; and these deaths were, for the most part, rapid, violent, and not unfrequently sudden, without any previous tokens of illness….
All the doorways into the streets were kept shut from either suspicion or alarm, except those which were left open because deserted or invaded; others nailed up and sealed outside, on account of the sick or dead who lay within; others marked with a cross drawn with coal, as an intimation to the monatti [men who removed the bodies] that there were dead to be carried away….
Everywhere were rags and corrupted bandages, infected straw, or clothes, or sheets, thrown from the windows; sometimes bodies, which had suddenly fallen dead in the streets, and were left there till a cart happened to pass by and pick them up, or shaken from off the carts themselves, or even thrown from the windows….
And while corpses, scattered here and there, or lying in heaps…made the city like one immense sepulchre, a still more appalling symptom, a more intense deformity, was their mutual animosity, their licentiousness, and their extravagant suspicion…not only did they mistrust a friend, a guest; but those names which are the bonds of human affection, husband and wife, father and son, brother and brother, were words of terror, and dreadful and infamous to tell! the domestic board, the nuptial bed, were dreaded as lurking-places, as receptacles of poison…
Men of the highest rank might be seen without cape or cloak, at that time a most essential part of any gentleman’s dress; priests without cassocks, friars without cowls; in short, all kinds of dress were dispensed with which could contract anything by fluttering about…And besides this carefulness to go about as trussed up and confined as possible, their persons were neglected and disorderly; the beards of such as were accustomed to wear them grown much longer, and suffered to grow by those who had formerly kept them shaven; their hair, too, long and undressed, not only from the neglect which usually attends long depression but because suspicion had been attached to barbers…
The greater number carried in one hand a stick, some even a pistol, as a threatening warning to anyone who should attempt to approach them stealthily; and in the other, perfumed pastils, or little balls of metal or wood, perforated and filled with sponges steeped in aromatic vinegar, which they applied from time to time, as they went along, to their noses, or held there continually.
Some carried a small vial hung around their neck, containing a little quick-silver, persuaded that this possessed the virtue of absorbing and arresting every pestilential effluvia; this they were very careful to renew from time to time…
Even friends, when they met in the streets alive, saluted each other at a distance, with silent and hasty signs. Every one, as he walked along, had enough to do to avoid the filthy and deadly stumbling-blocks with which the ground was strewn, and in some places even encumbered. Every one tried to keep the middle of the road, for fear of some other obstacle, some other more fatal weight, which might fall from the windows…
…the sick… were wandering about as if stupefied; and not a few were absolutely beside themselves: one would eagerly be relating his fancies to a miserable creature laboring under the malady; another would be actually raving; while a third appeared with a smiling countenance, as if assisting at some gay spectacle.
…two horses, which, stretching their necks and pawing with their hooves, could with difficulty make their way; and drawn by these a cart full of dead bodies, and after that another, and another, and another; and on each hand monatti walking by the side of the horses hastening them on with whips, blows, and curses. These corpses were for the most part naked, while some were miserably enveloped in tattered sheets, and were heaped up and twined together, almost like a nest of snakes unfolding themselves….at every trifling obstacle, at every jolt, these fatal groups were seen quivering and falling into horrible confusion, heads dangling down, women’s long tresses disheveled…
The entire story contained in one extravagant altarpiece by Giusto Le Court: On the left, the city of Venice (as usual, represented as a beautiful and wealthy woman) kneels to implore mercy and deliverance from the plague. In the center, the Virgin Mary, holding Jesus, makes a gracious gesture of assent. On the right, a cherub uses a torch to drive away the Plague, shown as a hideous hag, fleeing. Below is an icon of the Mesopanditissa, or Madonna of Health, brought from Crete by Francesco Morosini in 1670.
A few stalls are set up for selling candles; it's inconceivable to me that someone could come and not offer a candle, though I suppose there's no rule against it. The cheapest candle costs 2 euros (($2.69). The ones with the red base are often taken home, to be lighted in times of peril (usually storms). Burning a few leaves of the olive branch you brought home from Palm Sunday was (is still?) believed to ward off the danger.
Not wishing to spoil the party, I think it’s not a bad idea to acknowledge at least briefly that the day was fixed to express gratitude (or desire) for heavenly intervention in matters of life and death, and not primarily so we could buy balloons of Nemo and Spiderman and eat cotton candy and slabs of deep-fried dough slathered with chocolate.
The weather was perfect, by which I mean cold, raw, damp, foggy, and breezy. I’ve been to the basilica of the Salute to offer my candle on days when it was sunny and the temperature in the sixties, and I can tell you that it just feels wrong. This isn’t a happy holiday, it’s a solemn, penitential, I-really-mean-this kind of day, even though there are plenty of balloons and highly sugared and fat-laden treats being sold from stalls behind the church. It’s probably years before Venetian kids grasp the fact that the day isn’t dedicated to Our Lady of Fat and Sugar. Amazing, now that I think of it, that she should be honored as the guardian of health with this payload of calories. They ought to depict her — no disrespect intended — holding an insulin syringe.
Back to the weather: The worse it is, the happier are the Ladies who Mink. I’ve remarked before that this city is an unrepentant recidivist on the animal-skin subject. (I don’t count shearling in this category.) One winter evening I counted 11 mink coats on the vaporetto going home. Someone I know told me about a little old lady on the Lido who was packing her steamer trunks for a holiday in the Dolomites with four peltish coats. This was the minimum a woman could rationally consider bringing; no telling what your friends would think if they should see you in the same old fur, day after day.
Therefore Lino refers to this legendary day as the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coat. And laughs on the rare days when it turns out to be, as I mentioned, sunny and warm, because wearing their fur coat to the basilica is more important to these ladies than offering a candle for their husband, or maybe even for themselves. We enjoy imagining them hanging tough in the heat, wrapped in mink, wearing terrycloth headbands, like sweating tennis players.
Yesterday, though, I only saw one fur-like garment, and I am dead certain it was fake. This does not bode well, but I’m not sure for what.
You bring your candle into the basilica and eventually decide to join the crowd that clusters near the few points where volunteers are feverishly lighting and installing them in the racks.
It's rare to see someone with this many candles, this big. I can only hope she was offering them in thanksgiving, and not with pleas for intervention.Sometimes the children get to hold the candles.
It's hard work to take people's candles, light them and install them. Because you also have to remove somebody else's flaming candle first. These young men spend the day covered with wax drippings.
A few of the classic thank-offerings for answered prayers are displayed on the wall near the high altar. When I came to Venice, the walls were covered with these tokens of gratitude, representing true healings, something much bigger than even a very big candle. I wonder where they went, and why.
The street behind the church is just as crowded, but a lot more cheerful. Finally the kids get to gorge.
This is just one small part of the panoply. Lino remembers when only Venetian frittelle were sold, at stalls in front of the church. Now, with a minor exception, it's all sweets from Sicily.
The balloons have all gone Hollywood and evidently Geppetto is moonlighting.
Kids with candles, grown-ups with cotton candy. It's great.
