I have been in a lot of churches over the past four months. Not because I’ve had a religious conversion – though there was one cannelloni dinner in Tuscany good enough to make the angels weep. My church-going has been in the nature of touristic gawking. I have been in search of interesting art, not the lord, which would no doubt doom my soul to everlasting perdition if being a fallen Catholic hadn’t already accomplished that.
For centuries in Europe, the Catholic Church was the only artistic venue in town. It set the terms of what was acceptable art, and was often the only institution with enough money to showcase artists. Think of it as an ecclesiastical Broadway. It was where everyone wanted to perform. Or perhaps a religious MGM, holding the stars of the day under contract. Not Clark Gable but Michaelangelo; not Judy Garland but Titian. It told the heavy-hitters what and how they could perform: all Bible, all of the time. The Bible was to the Church what musicals were to MGM: widely understood and widely accepted topics of entertainment. Who doesn’t like a good musical? Who doesn’t like a (a) fresco, (b) tapestry, (c) sculpture, (d) painting of the Slaughter of the Innocents? Sing alleluia, c’mon, get happy!
The great cathedrals of Italy are like those “That’s Entertainment!” compendiums in which The Great Stars Of Yester-Year are feted, a cacophony of images culled from the crème de la crème. Walk into St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice and you witness a Renaissance version of the “Best Of . . .” The walls, ceilings, floors, every crack and cranny is covered with gilt, gold, or paint, and the whole lot is carved, sculpted or frescoed with religious images produced by an artistic chorus line of epic proportions. It’s like those Bugsby Berkeley dance routines where women dancers synchronized their movements to form twirling circles and flower patterns, or dove in unison off the sides of swimming pools, or tap danced en masse down glass stairs backlit with flashing lights while a brass band played a snappy tune. It’s overwhelming. In the same vein, you enter St. Marks and you want to clap your hands over your eyes or scrape a small square of wall clean of all embellishment and stare at it until your pupils quit vibrating from the visual overload.
Those churches that aren’t an explosion of decorative splendor tend to the opposite extreme: dark and foreboding. The Gerona Cathedral in Spain is a huge, brooding cavern of a church. Its side chapels are poorly lit, and hung with canvases whose grime-of-the-ages patina is so thick that only ghostly images emerge in the paintings. A painting of some saint whose name and back story is known only to the most devoted Catholic hung in an alcove and inexplicably, the dark canvas had small squares across it that looked like someone had taken a piece of adhesive, briefly affixed it to the canvas, and then ripped it off, thereby removing the layer of grit and revealing a lighter, brighter background. I called Max over to look at it. He had been busy fashioning a makeshift noose out of his shoelaces to try to hang himself with: anything to avoid another moment in a church looking at Catholic art. He staggered over and stared at the canvas.
I said to him, “Do you know who this is?”
I saw him fingering his noose longingly. “Somebody who died a million years ago in some horrible way?” he replied.
“No,” I admonished him. “It’s St. Sticky Note, the patron saint of Staples and Office Depot.” Because the small squares dotting the canvas were just the size of sticky notes.
Max immediately perked up. “He died from a thousand sticky notes, and you can pray to him when you run low on office supplies!” he said. “Let’s get a picture of him and tape it to your computer to keep it from mysteriously crashing!”
But of all the churches I’ve been in, nothing quite compares to Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, the oldest and largest church in the city. Initially constructed in the 1300s, the church was Catholic and was the recipient of considerable burgher bling from the rich Dutch merchants and town fathers. It had more 38 altars and stained glass galore, and its beautiful wooden ceiling was painted with rich, vibrant pictures.
Then the Protestants – specifically, the Calvinists – came to power and they ripped the church apart in the late 1500s. They pulled out the altars and painted over the ceiling and got rid of every drop of gilt and color they could lay their hands on. They even took away the pews. They were the Grinch, sweeping into Catholic Whoville, removing all the frippery and decorations and leaving only a shell of a building. When the church re-opened under Protestant management, church-goers had to bring their own chairs.
One of the few things in the church the Calvinists didn’t haul away or deface were the choir stalls, hand-carved in 1480 from a dark, brown wood. Maybe it’s because the choir stalls are so inconsistent with any decorative motif I’ve seen in any Catholic church I’ve been in that the Calvinists figured it wasn’t worth their valuable time to chop them up since the choir stalls weren’t really Catholic-ish to begin with. The stalls are composed of small fold-down wooden seats that are attached to one long wooden wall. When they are folded up, the bottoms of the wooden seats are flush against the wall. The choir members had the bottoms of their seats carved with different images. It being a church, the images often were little parables, little religious teachable moments carved into the seat of a chair. One carving shows a Dutch man in a hat and coat of the 1400s, his breeches about his ankles and his bare butt spewing out a large stack of coins. The parable, according to the free guide to the church that is handed out to all paying visitors? “Money doesn’t fall out of my arse.” I don’t know which I liked better: the carving of a 15th century Dutch man shitting coins or the translation into English of the message? Or the fact that both occurred within a church. Angels, cherubim, saints undergoing the pains of sainthood, the occasional Belzebub . . . . all regular carvings in any run-of-the-mill medieval Catholic church. A bare-assed merchant pooping money on a choir stall? Only in Amsterdam.
Another carving I liked was a creepy version of a two-headed person, grinning maniacally. The face had three eyes, two noses, and one very wide, toothy mouth. The caption? “Two drunks under one roof.” Eh? The translation provided in the hand-out: “Two people in agreement about everything, especially what’s wrong.” In today’s modern parlance, this would be Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
Another good one was the carved image of what appeared to be a brick wall, with the image of a man apparently banging his head against it. And that’s exactly what it was. The caption? “Banging your head against a brick wall.” Finally, a clear translation!
There was something very odd about wandering around this picked-over shell of a building. In recent years it has become an art venue, more than a church – another example of Amsterdam’s quixotic approach to many things. Build a medieval cathedral to rival those in Italy . . . and decorate it with carved images of pooping burghers and 14th century head-bangers. Tear it apart by anti-Catholic forces and yet still let it stand as one of the city’s most recognizable monuments that has been, in effect, pantsed. Take the city’s most famous church and turn it into an art venue. In one of the side chapels, which was stripped down to bare walls by the marauding 16th century Calvinists, a video loop plays of a woman peeling an apple. The video is without words or music. The woman grips the apple and peels it in one long peel. Scattered on the floor in front of the video screen are artistically-rendered bits of material that look like rotting apple peels. I tried my best to get the meaning behind it all. Was the woman a latter-day Eve, peeling the apple of temptation? Was the woman more likely the girlfriend of the videographer making her first arty cameo appearance?
Elsewhere there was a contraption hanging from the ceiling made from gauzy white linen. It was like a little cabana, hanging a few inches above the floor. What? How about the folding table at which 3 women and 3 men were self-consciously being waited on by a waiter serving them lunch and wine? Last supper? Last lunch?
Check, please!
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