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.
And most importantly, it does not belong to classical Greek iconography. Just as lions and griffins are not. Historians have either paid no attention to it or come up with paradoxical explanations. But, if they had regarded it with alchemical eyes, they may have found some very interesting operative hints in that perplexing composition.
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 .