This Week in Venice

By

Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J.

Week of April 23

If you were to vacation in Italy, and Venice in particular during this coming week, the

city would greet you with its annual public holiday on the 25th

, the feast of St. Mark. Though the

Catholic Church celebrates this liturgical feast, the city lavishly honors its patron saint with La

Festa di San Marco. Businesses and public offices are closed.

St. Mark the Evangelist

St Mark (or John Mark), mentioned in Acts 12:12, 25, traveled with St. Paul and

interpreted St. Peter. He collected many of Peter’s reflections and sayings in what has come to

be named the Gospel of St. Mark, the first of the four, written ca. 70 AD. The other evangelists

are Matthew, Luke, and John—gospel writers all.

Mood of the Gospel

The Suffering Servant, the Messiah-King, is the theme that runs through the entire gospel,

and from the outset, the atmosphere of danger and persecution is palpable. The occasion for

Mark’s writing this gospel may have been the death of Peter (AD 64) during Nero’s reign (AD

54-68) and the suffering that would usher in the persecutions of Christians in the Early Church.

In Christian iconography, Mark is depicted with a winged lion beside him: “And the first living

creature was like a lion . . . .” (Revelations 4:7). In Mark’s gospel, the Messiah-King was the

personification of courage. His disciples must also live courageously, even in martyrdom; thus,

the figure of a lion.

Detail of the gable showing Venice's patron apostle St. Mark with angels. Underneath is a winged lion, the

symbol of the saint and of Venice.

Medieval manuscript of St. Mark’s Gospel with winged lion sitting at the saint’s feet.

Marvel of Venice

Almost no surviving records deal with the founding of Venice. Still the date of March

25th

, 421 is noted for the dedication of San Giacomo (James) Church on the isle of Rialto. It was

the feast of the Annunciation of the Lord.

Venice is a marvel of construction, a city of 118 islands built on the Adriatic Sea. The

buildings sit on a foundation constructed of spaced wooden piles submerged in the water. These

piles are made from trunks of alder trees whose wood is noted for its resistance to water. The

piles penetrate a softer layer of sand and mud until they reach the lowest level, a much harder

layer of compressed clay. Limestone, placed over and above these wooden piles, serves as a

buffer between the buildings and the support system. This singular feat of construction has

earned Venice several titles: “Queen of the Adriatic,” “City of Water,” “City of Bridges,” “The

Floating City,” and “City of Canals.” And what of the construction workers?

Façade of St. Mark’s Basilica, of Italo-Byzantine style and Square with tourists awaiting entrance

View of St. Mark’s on the Grand Canal

Aerial view of St. Mark’s basilica

Activities on the Feast of St. Mark

After the celebration of a festive Liturgy in the basilica on April 25th

, a highlight of the day is the

Regata di Traghetti, a boat race featuring gondoliers who compete while transporting passengers

in their gondolas—car racing, Venetian style. A picture of the boat race on the Grand Canal, is

shown below. There are also concerts and carnivals to enjoy, as well as open air markets.

Interior of Saint Mark’s

The basilica is shaped in the tradition form of a cross. The upper levels of the interior are

completely covered with bright mosaics, an art form made from assembling small pieces of

colored glass, stone, or other materials; they are also used in decorative art or interior decoration.

Thee small, flat, roughly square pieces of stone or glass of different colors are known as tesserae.

Some, especially floor mosaics, are made of small rounded pieces of stone, and called “pebble

mosaics.” The overall impression of the interior with a dazzling display of mosaics on all

ceilings and upper walls has remained unchanged through the centuries.

Mosaic ceiling. Jesus the Pantocrator, 15th

c

Overview of mosaics, looking east

Inlay mosaic pavement of interior

Inlay mosaic pavement of interior

Quadrophonic Music in the Sixteenth Century

Today we take quadrophonic sound for granted which gives the sense of being

surrounded by the musical sound. In sixteenth-century Venice, this came to be known as the

polychoral style, a type of music which involved spatially separate choirs singing or playing in

alternation. It was also known as cori spezzati—literally, separated choirs.

The style arose from the architectural peculiarities of St. Mark’s which had several choir

lofts. It was difficult to get widely separated choirs to sing or play the same music

simultaneously. Composers such as Adrian Willaert, the maestro di cappella of St. Mark's in the

1540s, solved the problem by writing antiphonal music where opposite choirs would sing

successive and often contrasting phrases of the music; the stereo effect proved to be popular, and

soon other composers were imitating this musical technique in other large cathedrals in Italy.

This was a rare but interesting case of the architectural characteristic of a single building

influencing the development of a style which spread all over Europe, but was a defining feature

of the early Baroque era.

The peak of development of the style came in the late 1580s and 1590s, while Giovanni

Gabrieli was San Marco’s principal composer. He was the first to specify large choirs of brass to

develop the “echo” effects for which he became famous. The fame of the spectacular musical

effects of San Marco spread across Europe, and “numerous musicians came to Venice to hear,

study, absorb and bring back to their native countries what they learned in Venice.”

Depiction of Saint Mark’s in the Sixteenth Century

Procession around the Square of San Marco. Painting by Gentile Bellini (1496)

Details of Bellini painting executed between 1496 and 1501

The canvas shows an event that took place about fifty years earlier, on 25 April 1444, the

feast of St. Mark. While the members of the choir were processing through the Piazza, Jacopo

de' Salis, a tradesman from Brescia, knelt in prayer before the relic of St. Mark that his dying son

might recover. His prayer was answered; the boy was cured.

In the foreground, Gentile Bellini has painted the confraternity in its white robes,

processing at the head of the parade, the large golden reliquary suspended between them, carried

beneath a canopy held by four additional choir members. In reality, “the painting should be more

accurately described as the procession around St. Mark’s square and on St. Mark’s Basilica itself

with its Byzantine domes and glittering mosaics. The miracle is hardly visible in the crowd:

immediately to the right of the last two canopy-bearers, he kneels in sumptuous red robes.

The present basilica dates from approximately 1063—another marvel of construction.

The consecration was in fact a series of consecrations for different parts of the basilica. Below, a

spectacular view of the Grand Canal

Aerial view of Venice’s Grand Canal