The Basilica di San Marco has three huge domes, not just one--impossible as that may seem. All of them are mosaics, if you can even begin to imagine that, all of them bent on creating a cosmic spiritual vision unlike any I'd ever seen. Forget all those icons for a moment, just try to imagine being in a vaulted expanse that seems nothing less than pure gold. I'd been in lots of monumental cathedrals in Europe and America, but there just seemed to be nothing comparable to this marvel, already a thousand years old.
This dome--trust me, I read up on it--is St. Mark's Pentecost Cupola. Note the lines streaming from the very top, where a dove--the Holy Spirit--sits and sends out shoots of flame to the heads of the surrounding saints. Lest you believe that the events of Pentecost brought enlightenment only to the apostles, beneath them stand ordinary people, in pairs, from around the world. You and me, I'd say. Pentecost is, after all, for everyone.
I grew up in a new church. I remember the old one downtown, but the new one was home when I started to look around and see the world with my own eyes. Call me a sinner, but I remember counting knotholes in the knotty pine ceiling. When what was happening up front got stale or boring, I'd look up and count to see which stretches of blond pine were most busily peppered.
If back then I'd gone to church in St. Mark's, Venice, I would never have heard a word of the sermon. But then, as far back as 900 A.D., congregants here didn't gather to listen to the preaching of the Word. Honestly, I don't remember seeing a pulpit in St. Mark's. I'm sure there was one, but I don't think I saw it because preaching wasn't all that important. You go to church, to mass, not to hear the Word preached but to taste God, to take his body and blood, take Him, into yourself, as he promised you would.
So if the church was the place where you were God himself was distributed, all that fabulous excess is somehow understandable, a huge cave of gold, even to someone like me who was raised a Calvinist in a small town where a brand new church would be dang proud of its knotty pine ceilings.
But it also helps me to understand why, at least for me, walking into the Basilica di San Marco was unlike stepping into anything else I'd ever been. If you want to understand how rich Venice was back then, how blessed the place was with wealth--lots of it pilfered--from around the world, visit the Basilica. Gaze at that ceiling, at the Pentecost Cupola, one of three, all of creating an aura of pure gold. This is the place of eucharist, of God-with-us.
I didn't mean to have this janitor photo bomb the place, but just now, honestly, when I was looking over the pictures I took, I found her. It's not a great picture, but it's made memorable by her presence, down there, just a bit out of focus, on the bottom right.
She's just what you need when you visit a place like St. Mark's. Down beneath the blessings documented in the Pentecost Cupola, she's a reminder of everything Psalm 90 so touchingly says. She sweeping up, dust to dust.
I know why I took this picture. See the way the statuary above her and to her right is sun lit through the windows across the way? I couldn't help thinking that phenomenon was itself a miracle. Cathedrals are not brightly lit. But when they have windows, as St. Mark's does, the rotation of the earth creates a roving spotlight from the sun, a spotlight that, for a time at least, creeps almost eerily from one darkened corner to the next. "Have you seen this?" the light says. It's a gorgeous show.
Photography is all about light--where it is and where it isn't. This shot is only tangentially about the basilica. It was really supposed to be about light.
And there she is, a veteran of the janitorial staff, reminding me--and now you--that all of the what's here above and around, all of this splendid art and artifice, isn't the whole story.
She comes by regularly, I'm sure, because there's dust, you know, and maybe even a little trash, refuse from the real world, the other one, the one where all of live.
In a place like the Basilica di San Marco, she's much more than janitor. She's something of a grim reaper.
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