Half an hour’s work on a holiday in Venice
There is not much profit in standing around in church for half an hour despising a succession of strangers who encroach upon your space. So before attempting to hear Mass at St Mark’s in Venice, it is absolutely necessary to set yourself not to mind the interruptions.
The tourists (always them, never us, of course) walk their course between iron barriers, like cattle on the way to auction. The wear of their feet is diminished by spongy mats, the dry smell from which mingles with the canal-water smell as the tide wells up in the narthex.
Like visitors to the Louvre spending three minutes in front of the Mona Lisa, these tourists have spent a lot of money reaching Venice, and perhaps more eating here, but they simply cannot stay still and see what lies about them. Even if a wife sits down on a bench, her husband soon comes to move her on after a minute or two.
Yet in January it is easy to walk straight in to the basilica of St Mark without queuing or paying, and at 11 o’clock a priest comes to the quiet north transept and, kissing the ancient altar beneath a baldacchino of oxidised marble, begins Mass in Italian for the handful who care to stay.
If you come for the sake of an aesthetic experience, you are likely to miss it. Certainly the concomitants are strange, like some daily ritual from Gormenghast.
The lay sacristan gets things ready with an efficient carelessness, stowing the replenished cruets of water and wine in their place, unlatching the medieval ironwork altar gates, so that they swing forward and flap, with a noise like a wave from a passing vaporetto, on the stone altar-rails. Then, with a scrabbling motion, he gathers up in a bundle from their stand the thin candles still burning and rearranges them economically, blowing out any deemed to be more burnt than new.
The candles are offerings that go with prayers for the intercession of the Virgin Mary, here honoured under the title of Nicopeia. The icon standing behind the altar is reckoned to be of the 10th century and was presumably brought back from Constantinople after the Venetians sacked the city in 1204. Its Greek name suggests the working of victories, though down the centuries the victories that the Venetians sought were as likely to be over plague as over the threat of Ottoman expansion.
The Virgin Mary, painted on wood, displays the Child Jesus directly before her, not held to one side. But what we see now is not what John Ruskin would have seen 150 years ago. In 1969 the icon was restored, and the gold cover removed that concealed all but the central figures. That cover had broad haloes set with uncut gems, which have a beauty unlike that of sharp-faceted modern stones.
The interior of St Mark’s is like that: a visitor assumes that what is there is unchanging, but change and decay continue. In the north transept, the floor is made from cut pieces of coloured stone, opus sectile, like the Cosmati work floor before Westminster Abbey’s high altar. At St Mark’s, some has been remade, the little squares and triangles machine-cut and icily regular. Older parts remain, of less perfect finish and sunken and uneven as the swell of the sea.
Yet the daily round continues. The nine oil lamps hanging at this altar are replenished. The veil of the chalice, like the priest’s chasuble changes with the liturgy of the seasons: purple, to white, to green, and to red for the patron, St Mark, Evangelist and martyr, whose relics lie beneath the high altar only yards away. Liturgy means “public work”, and this is no museum but a working place of worship.