Funeral Games
Scour your local charity shops for a copy of ‘Venice – Photographs by David Hamilton’ (Pavilion Books, 1989): the old child-peeper’s smeary shots are of no more interest than one would expect, but the book does contain a remarkable, if incongruous, introductory essay by Peter Lauritzen. Try this:
..It was also in these final decades of the fifteenth century – in the era when Giovanni Bellini and his pupils were inaugurating a Golden Age of Venetian art – that extraordinary ceremonies were being devised for the funerals of the Republic’s Doges as part of the vision of Venice. After the Doge had lain in state for three days, his body, swathed in the most lavish golden robes, was borne on a litter through the Piazza and along the city’s winding streets to reach the great Gothic church of the Dominican order, San Giovanni e Paolo. The most prominent of the city’s six great secular confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, led the procession. Its meeting hall had long stood adjacent to the church. However, it is seldom realised that the immensely wealthy civic corporation had commissioned a new façade for their building just at this time simply to provide a suitably grand backdrop for the ducal funerals. Mauro Codussi, the architect who completed the building, went even further by moving its crowning elements along the roof line towards the canal so that the entire composition would be centred not on the building itself, but on the first distant view of it from a small bridge over the canal which each of the ducal funeral processions would have to cross.
But the effect of these spectacular public celebrations of the state was not limited to the remodelling of one or two facades. The immense Monks’ Choir inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo had to be removed from inside the building in the seventeenth century in order to accommodate the vast catafalques that were erected to receive the Doge’s corpse during the ducal obsequies. These had become multi-tiered affairs, draped in silver-trimmed black velvet and decked out with literally thousands of candles. The Patriarch of Venice had to climb up several flights of stairs to reach the level where the ducal litter was set down in order to bestow his blessing on the dead Doge. Once the absolution had been given, the Doge’s body was taken to the sacristy where it was stripped. His golden robes would be distributed among the city’s religious houses to make up chasubles, dalmatics and copes: the golden liturgical vestments of the church. It was also at this moment in the sacristy that the reality behind these great ceremonies became apparent as the defunct Doge lay revealed as a straw dummy whose face was nothing more than a wax mask. The real Doge had been buried in secret even before the ceremony of Lying-in-State had begun..
Scour your local charity shops for a copy of ‘Venice – Photographs by David Hamilton’ (Pavilion Books, 1989): the old child-peeper’s smeary shots are of no more interest than one would expect, but the book does contain a remarkable, if incongruous, introductory essay by Peter Lauritzen. Try this:
..It was also in these final decades of the fifteenth century – in the era when Giovanni Bellini and his pupils were inaugurating a Golden Age of Venetian art – that extraordinary ceremonies were being devised for the funerals of the Republic’s Doges as part of the vision of Venice. After the Doge had lain in state for three days, his body, swathed in the most lavish golden robes, was borne on a litter through the Piazza and along the city’s winding streets to reach the great Gothic church of the Dominican order, San Giovanni e Paolo. The most prominent of the city’s six great secular confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, led the procession. Its meeting hall had long stood adjacent to the church. However, it is seldom realised that the immensely wealthy civic corporation had commissioned a new façade for their building just at this time simply to provide a suitably grand backdrop for the ducal funerals. Mauro Codussi, the architect who completed the building, went even further by moving its crowning elements along the roof line towards the canal so that the entire composition would be centred not on the building itself, but on the first distant view of it from a small bridge over the canal which each of the ducal funeral processions would have to cross.
But the effect of these spectacular public celebrations of the state was not limited to the remodelling of one or two facades. The immense Monks’ Choir inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo had to be removed from inside the building in the seventeenth century in order to accommodate the vast catafalques that were erected to receive the Doge’s corpse during the ducal obsequies. These had become multi-tiered affairs, draped in silver-trimmed black velvet and decked out with literally thousands of candles. The Patriarch of Venice had to climb up several flights of stairs to reach the level where the ducal litter was set down in order to bestow his blessing on the dead Doge. Once the absolution had been given, the Doge’s body was taken to the sacristy where it was stripped. His golden robes would be distributed among the city’s religious houses to make up chasubles, dalmatics and copes: the golden liturgical vestments of the church. It was also at this moment in the sacristy that the reality behind these great ceremonies became apparent as the defunct Doge lay revealed as a straw dummy whose face was nothing more than a wax mask. The real Doge had been buried in secret even before the ceremony of Lying-in-State had begun..
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