Faith and Iconography

Today gave me a chance to revisit two places that have stuck with me ever since our first visit to Italy, twelve years ago. Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Saint Mary of the Miracles/Miraculous) caught out attention one day when things weren't going so good. Mary had just lost her new tripod, we tried backtracking to see if we could find it and there was this church with a green patina dome, reflected in a canal and a bit out of reach, but breathtaking in its simplicity. Mary took a photo that she has since used over the years, one of her better Venice pictures. The other place, the Museo Ellenico, home to a beautiful collection of Greco-Byzantine icons and panel paintings, changed my life. Today I had a wonderful opportunity to reflect back on the way my experience of Venetian art twelve years ago opened me up to the powerful expression of Catholic/Christian iconography and how I've since come to understand the spiritual value of art.

Santa Maria dei Miracoli is often called the "jewel box" church because it is small, compact and sparkling inside. The first Renaissance church in Venice, it has a simple, elegant floor layout -- a rectangle with a high walls and a tall dome, a very high altar in relation to the pews, and a highly detailed ceiling patterned with golden rectangles and arches that frame some fifty portraits of prophets and saints. Other than some sweet statues of angels and saints and childlike figures carved around the runners of the altar, the church is spare and calming, not at all like the busy art warehouse churches that suffocate you with an over abundance of every style of art ever produced here. And on the altar is a simple representation of Mary and the Christ child, bright carmine in a somber black frame, the miraculous icon that gives this church its name and its power.

I did my tourist thing, snapped some pictures of the altar and the sculptures and the relief of one of the evangelists high up in the corner. And then I put my camera away, knelt down at a pew and prayed for a few moments. I don't pray very often. When I came back from that first visit to Italy, I suddenly realized that looking at all of that religious art was bringing back memories of my Catholic school days, and memories of how much I was affected by the rituals of my neighborhood church on the East Side of Buffalo, New York. For many reasons, I came back to the church, attended Mass regularly and took communion. I did this for almost 3 years, but after all of the revelations about pedophilia and the institutional cover up by the Vatican, it became increasingly harder and harder to accept the ongoing criticism of American Catholics. Sermon after sermon, the priests, especially ones from Spain, would say American Catholics think too much, thinking is an act of pride, just surrender to the Church because the Church has already solved all of your problems. I don't think so.

But the calming silence of the empty church, suffused with light around the painting on the altar, put me into a reflective place. I said a "Hail Mary" and then meditated on what the spiritual means to me. I can't separate the body from the spirit, I can't embrace those traditional notions of life after death, the resurrection of the dead, the millennial return of Christ. Our spirits are integral to our bodies and salvation, I am coming to believe, has more to do with the creative realization of human powers than any absorption of a vapory spirit into a transcendent, invisible heavenly kingdom. The rituals and the iconography represent stages of spiritual growth, useful tales that help us understand birth and suffering and death. I prayed that I would find salvation in the resolution of my fears and uncertainties about life, not an escape route from the body. I always wanted to come back to SM dei Miracoli, to discover what was inside of her and I found myself reflecting on what was inside of me. Such is the nature of a personal religious experience.

As for the Museo Ellenico. It is late and I'm tired from walking all over Venice, looking for art. The biggest revelation from today's visit is in the outsider aspect of Greek art in Venice. Art history tells us that things began to cook in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the rigid, formal, schematized iconography of Byzantine art started to melt around the edges as Giotto and his contemporaries added volume to the human figure, set in more naturalistic and dramatic settings. In fact, the art collected in the Museo Ellenico is very much about the highly unorthodox way Byzantine artists, fleeing the collapse of Constantinople and the sudden victory of the Turkish empire over the decaying remains of the Eastern Roman empire, absorbed elements of Western art -- narrative conventions explored by Giotto and the later International Gothic movement -- to produce work in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries that was absolutely out of step with the full bodied, fleshy, materialist art that we come to think of  as Venetian masterworks. At the same time that Titian and Tintoretto were manifesting the spirit in fully realized, bombastic materialist forms, the Greco-Byzantine artists were producing a cartoon-like retelling of old and new testament stories in a dynamically fragmented picture space that reminds me of the kind of crazed psychological representations you would find in Juxtapose magazine in the 1990s and early 2000s. I think I may be the only one of the planet who sees this connection, but i'ts one I wanted to explore ever since my first visit to the museum. The visit today only confirmed my original intuition that there are lessons to be learned from an art that maintained a tradition no one but the Byzantine refugees wanted to perserve. That's a fascinating story.