Why had a child’s rear emerged from a chiseled bucket in the church-shaped treasure-reliquary-censer of San Marco? In Venetian sources, this little church in the Procuratie treasury has been known as “ Ecclesiola di San Marco”, or little church of San Marco, since its arrival in Venice, that’s to say, apparently before 1282, when the first treasury inventory was taken.
The object was already archived as “a reliquary encased within a little silver church”. This is undoubtedly the church-like box we are examining: once the Ecclesiola had arrived in the city, it was immediately reworked into a reliquary. This magnificent object became a suitable container for the precious Holy Blood that Venetians brought from Beirut to proclaim the eastern origin of the relic. On that occasion, the Ecclesiola central dome was removed and made removable, thus reinforcing its base through a circular hole of the same diameter as the latter, practiced on the same plate. The base was remade in a metal diaphragm, along the perimeter, on the outside, and then on the top of the outer walls. On the dome and the base of the rebuilt temple appear intertwined monograms M and V, that did not originally belong to the artifact. The statement comes from the absolute diversity of material detectable in parts of the original gilded silver.
The San Marco Treasure church-like box stands on a square plan (cm.23 for 23) with four exedras emerging from its sides, one of which opens the door to two hinges tilt. The width between the top of the apse is semi-circles of 30 cm. The height from the base to the top of the central lantern is 36 centimeters. The interior, formed by the articulated base with four walls and apses, is isolated from the four peripheral domes and vaults from the four corners with an inserted metal plate.
The place of manufacture is uncertain. The upper part, with a five-domed structure, presents both byzantine and western art influences and recalls two specimens preserved at the Museum of the Orthodox Church in Belgrade, imitating a church with five domes and a cubic one in Aachen with a dome. But here in the Ecclesiola upper register of domes, we can also see pyramidal roofs at corners, and this combination is atypical and lacks surviving comparanda. Some studies estimate a duly manufacture in Venice, others in South Italy, and some in Byzantium. Henry Maguire states, “the censer displays the distinctive five-domed cruciform scheme of Byzantium preminent pilgrimage church, the Apostoleion, albeit with additional pyramidal roofs in the corners of the central dome. A striking fact that has escaped previous scholarship on San Marco is that the shapes of the domes, and especially the additional open cupola over the middle dome of the censer, also coincide with that of the outer shells of the domes of San Marco, raised over the lower byzantine in the 1260s. However, the dome shapes may have originated in Islamic Egypt.” (1). According to Fernanda De’ Maffei: “ … the same plant again in the church of the Virgin, in the district Fanaro of Byzantium. Also, in 972, John Zimiskes erected a chapel with four apses as his tomb at Chalke Pyli. Finally, this form is also characterized by the Veljusa monastery church… it is not unusual in Christian and Byzantine art if one remembers that emperor Teophilo (829-842) built-in Byzantium imperial palace with the three apses…. while the shape of domes is present only in Saint John of the Hermits or San Cataldo in Palermo, assuming the South as a place of origin. ”(2). Kalavrezou assumes the work is Byzantine, noting the lack of surviving comparanda (3). Grabar and Gaborit-Chopin describe the foliate ornament and the bulbous shape of the domes, which suggest the impact of Islamic art and, thus, a possible Sicilian provenance (4). Additionally, André Grabar has hypothesized a dependence of the ecclesiola on Sassanian models, considering unusual for the byzantine world a squared base with four exedras (5).
What is of most importance to justify my research, and above all my postulate, is to discover what this late twelfth-century perforated partly gilded silver container in a shape of a five-domed structure, or church-like box, had been created for. Evangelia Hadjitryphonos and Slobodan Curcic describe it as made to partially gilded silver and with a perforated decoration on domed roofs, as well as on corner pyramidal towers and the upper level of the walls, showing drawings of leaves in circular shapes, patterns beneath palm trees with pointed leaves and compositions consisting of palm and flowers. Embossed decorations form the lower level and the import lanes, decorated with floral motifs (stems, wheels, leaves), and divided the walls into two zones.
As only if we can state the box being a reliquary, an incense burner, a lamp, or an artoforion for the preservation of the eucharistic bread can we try to shed light on the symbolic chisels that decorate the perforated domes and the secular iconography of foliate arabesques, fantastic animals, and personifications: lions, griffins, sirens, and centaurs.
These may nowadays be seen as very unusual symbols for liturgical items. Still, they were not in the twelfth century, the most probable period of our silver box making, and which a hermetically educated eye could have unquestionably perceived as Alchemy signs, furthermore back at that time.
Hadjitryphonos and Curcic have identified the use of Ecclesiola: “The rationale for the reuse of the temple-shaped incense burner as a reliquary was likely to highlight the provenance of the relics from the eastern Mediterranean and certify their authenticity. However, although the sacred origins of the artwork are clear, there are still some doubts about the original use of the chapel as a censer, lamp, or tabernacle” (6).
Yet, in many scholars’ milieus, there is opposition to that. According to André Grabar, the little temple box originally had nothing to do with relics and probably served as an incense burner in a secular setting. A similar target of perfume diffuser was assigned by D. Gaborit Chopin, who agreed to read it in a profane sense. However, it must be admitted that the Ecclesiola perforated area is enormous and formed by a flowery and greenery arabesque, and this seems relatively conventional in Christian orthodox ecclesiastic incense burners, as we can see from some ecclesiastic incense burners sharing a similar perforated upper part as well as a church-like structure.
For Fernanda De’ Maffei, the Ecclesiola has neither the size nor the weight nor the structure of professional incense burners but instead of a tabernacle-temple image of the heavenly city in which the defects remain outside, where one can enter only through the practice of virtue. She consequently suggests the object having had the artoforion function for preserving the eucharistic bread for which the tunnels seem to favor the passage of air and prevent the onset of mold on consecrated bread. But most of these items are generally airless to prevent molds. They are authentic boxes. In ancient times these caskets could also be church-like structured and were called tabernacles, but they tended to be airless too.
Concerning the puzzling embossed symbolism, De’ Maffei suggests the lion being a symbol of violence, the griffin union of lion and eagle, the sirens symbol of temptations, on the two doors two virtues personified, the centaur a man who does not master passions. Hadjitryphonos and Curcic also try to decipher the medieval embossed symbolism of Ecclesiola as images that reproduce human sins. The two scholars propose the two small doors as moral virtues to help people in their fight against evil to enter the “little heavenly ecclesiastical Jerusalem”. However, de’ Maffei, Hadjitryphonos, and Curcic fail to explain how on earth, either a sacred tabernacle or an incense burner could have a series of sexual sins (in their opinions) represented all around the perimetral wall.
As for the baby, Hadjitryphonos and Curcic have no doubts in calling him a Cupid with his head tucked into an overturned basket and giving no reason for the odd posture. In the same scene, De ‘Maffei sees, on the contrary, a child with his behind protruding from a bucket. From a visual point of view, there is not a big difference, while from the allegorical point of view, the difference would be substantial. In fact, without hesitation, De ‘Maffei elects the figure of the child as an erotic symbol.
To be honest, the Italian scholar employs another latin phrase-word I refuse to paste: in no ancient greek iconography, we can find a child so small treated or regarded in that perverted way, and the child represented in the ecclesiola certainly is quite a toddler, not an ephebe.
Not that children were treated very well in the Greek vascular art imagery. The painting of newborns or young children has remained rare in the narration of everyday life, more focused on the world of ephebes and adults (love scenes, banquets, gynecium, etc.). However, some scenes of gynaeceum were the pretext to draw the child in the arms of his mother or a servant. At the time of the Peloponnesian War, the classical painters, introducing pathetic notations, enriched the banal theme of the warrior’s departure. They then showed, surrounded by his family, the father saying farewell to his son before going into battle. A later series of miniature vases for children called chous still reproduce their favorite games.
Apart from the specific iconography of the cauldron. In these sporadic cases, children emerge from some cauldron: they are myths of immortality. And underneath, it is implied there is alchemical fire (which is not common). On Amiens Cathedral’s external walls, we can see a low relief putting on display a similar situation of a child’s body protruding from the bucket.
However, a child crawling into a cauldron out of curiosity is an unusual scene. One possibility is that the scene may represent Dionysus, the human mind, drawn to toys and torn to pieces. But where are the elements of attraction for the child? Of course, maybe the pot itself. But the Ecclesiola is an incense burner.
Byzantine people were not scared to use anatomical details in their profane art (see the famed Veroli casket) and provided strict rules on sacred art. What may seem a secular symbolism embossed in Ecclesiola carries out iconographic themes also used in laboratories that served the imperial court, but the child rear, which might remain puzzling even to byzantine eyes. Unlike the Greek imaginary, in which nudity expressed a condition beyond corporeality, the iconography of naked bodies is often employed in Alchemy. Still, they never are a sexual target: when we refer to laboratory alchemy, we always mean physics processes.
We will excavate the concept deeper in a Tiziano painting; for the moment, I can tell you that every time nudity is involved, there is an operative process too. So, when I spotted this figure for the first time, a question spontaneously arose: “ and what if it were not an allegory at all?”. A lion is an allegory for the soul, a griffin for the spirit of life. More specifically, in laboratory Alchemy the lion represents our fixed salt, while the griffin is the volatile one. In short, our Solve et Coagula alchemical engine. The siren could represent our female dissolvent, and the man the dissolved. In fact, on the word “Centaur,” Dom Pernety, in his Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermetique, wrote: ” it is the vessel with the fiery fixed and volatile mercurius and their combat. Before the meeting of two perfect, it is a fight of one and the other, which produces the dissolution and volatilization indicated by Lapiths, which means to rise arrogantly”. In these few lines, we have resumed Alchemy as a whole. That’s to say, in all the symbols embossed in Ecclesiola, but not yet a child rear in a bucket. Furthermore, why all that symbology for an incense burner?
There is no getting around the Ecclesiola strange child’s posture to indicate an anatomical part. Looking closely at the basket, we can observe that the unusual basket alternately approximates a bucket. Everyone adjacent to an infant for a reasonable amount of time will notice the children’s tendency to spend much of their time ( and ours) in their physiological functions. An infant tends to urinate more often than an adult.
From time to time, you may have seen some alchemical pictures representing a child urinating. Cabala mineralis is the most comprehensive ( as all the painted scenery in that collection does originate from adolescent urine), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili gravure 85 with a suspended child to urinate on the first blackness ( just a drop of adjunctive Secret Fire). So we have this concept of a child’s urine together with Secret Fire.
Secret Fire is the Alchemy foundation, as I repeat in quite every article, that’s to say, an ineffable substance coming from stars and still dwelling in electronic clouds. We certainly do have Secret Fire in children’s urine. But this is not the real point here. Since children’s urine also contains interesting chemicals, Secret Fire is extracted using chemistry. Well… it has never been a secret that children’s urine contains more benzoic acid/hippuric acid (1) than adults do (along with an increased amount of Secret Fire). The point here is: “ together with Secret Fire, may we also extract a very volatile salt from children’s urine?” (2).
As I mentioned above, I think the symbology around Ecclesiola is a complete description of the basic alchemical operations. Concerning the child rear in a bucket, we can finally argue being the very “fountain” where to get some volatile Secret Fire, or merely an effective volatile salt to help lift, or sublimate, more heavy minerals to achieve our Mercurius. But, as this explanation seems too easy, was there a hidden and indispensable reason to decorate without vagueness and positively an incense burner?
As we will see in the following articles, vapor brings along vapors, smoke brings along smoke, and gas brings along gasses. This is an operative truth very much used among ancient alchemists. And hermeticists too (3).
But there is also the case in which the child does not urinate but intends to defecate. Again, only the operations would change. However unbecoming it may seem, the gold coins described by Canseliet can genuinely emerge from the physiological waste of children.
Images: San Marco Ecclesiola details; Censer; Temple-like Katzios incense burner Cappadocia; Stone temple 12th Crimea; Stone square church 11th 13th Armenia; Temple-like box Romania; Lecythe de Leyden; Speculum Veritatis 2; Cabala Mineralis.
- “San Marco, Byzantium and the Myths of Venice” H.Maguire and R.S.Nelson editors, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, 2010;
- “l’Ecclesiola nel Tesoro di San Marco a Venezia. Indagine preliminare” in “Bisanzio e l’Occidente: arte, archeologia, storia : studi in onore di Fernanda de’ Maffei”, by Fernanda De’ Maffei and Claudia Barsanti, Viella, 1996. Arte documento, Volume 13 Università di Udine. Cattedra di storia dell’arte moderna I., Centro per la promozione e lo sviluppo del corso di laurea in storia e tutela dei beni culturali, by Giulia Grassi, Electa, 1999;
- “Incense burner in the shape of a domed building” in “Glory of Byzantium” by I.Kalavrezou, New York 1997;
- “Lamp or perfume-Burner in the shape of domed building” in Treasury of San Marco by D. Gaborit-Chopin;
- “Il Tesoro di San Marco” by André Grabar, Florence 1971;
- “Architecture as Icon – Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art” by Dr. Evangelia Hadjitryphonos & Slobodan Curcic (eds) 2009, European Centre of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments – ΕΚΒΜΜ;
- Monique Halm-Tisserant, Cannibalisme et Immortalité, Les Belles Lettres, 2007.
- To know more about benzoic acid: Phantom Play’s Tribute to the raising Benzoin.
- On volatile urine salts see also Hollandus, How Urine Salts Extract a White and Red Dye , Lancillotti and the Magisterium of Urine on Caput Mortuum , Glaser and the Unladylike, but Volatile, Salt of Urine , Cabala Mineralis or the She Horse on Urine Work part 1;
- On human excrement: Alchemy and Excrements in Sacred and Profane Art .