Glacial Errata, No. 67

One

For a long time, whenever anyone I knew was going to Venice, I’d say to them, “See if you can find this mosaic and bring me back a photo.”

Here’s the story: Patrick Geary’s Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages is one of my favorite books, and it’s played a major role in at least three of my own books. It’s a history of relic theft and translation—how saints’ relics during the Middle Ages were so important, economically and culturally, that it was a common occurrence for monks and priests to simply steal them.

Now, being religious people, these guys didn’t call it “theft,” necessarily, and they didn’t see what they were doing as theft, either. Instead, they would more or less convince themselves that the saint’s relics were unhappy, and that they wanted to leave their current home in whatever monastery or church they were located in and be relocated.

I used Geary’s book in my first book, Cranioklepty, to help explain why, in a secular context, a lover of music might be so moved to dig up the corpse of Franz Josef Haydn a few days after his death, cut off his decomposing head, clean off the skull, mount it in a glass case to be placed on one’s mantel, and keep it as a memento (among other acts of skull thievery). It was also useful in my second book, which was more explicitly about Catholic saints. And I returned to it again in The Unidentified, recounting the very strange story about how some British cryptid enthusiasts secreted a supposed Yeti hand out of a Nepalese monastery (with the aid of Jimmy Stewart).

Two

In various talks I would give on the subject, it was handy to have visual illustrations, and what I always wanted to use when talking about relic theft was the mosaic that appears on the cover of Geary’s book, which is from Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice—not only does it nicely depict a group of men in the act of appropriating Saint Mark’s body to be taken to Venice, they have such weirdly obviously guilty looks on their faces.

I mean, in the context of the basilica’s history, of course, this is depicted as a holy, sacred act. The relics of Saint Mark the evangelist, the story goes, were held in Muslim-controlled Alexandria, and in the ninth century a fleet of Venetian traders were stranded there in a storm; they prayed daily at the church holding the saint’s relics, but when word came out that the church was going to be demolished, they decided to steal the relics and bring them back to Venice. According to the story, to avoid raising suspicion, they first swapped Mark’s remains with those of another saint, and then covered his bones with a big pile of pork, and then smuggled them back to Venice. Anyway, so this is treated in the history of Venice and the basilica as an important, holy act, and yet, in the mosaic, their expressions are just fundamentally priceless. It’s the perfect illustration.

The problem has always been, that the image on the cover of Furta Sacra is not only in black and white, all of the images of it are of a particularly low resolution. And it’s been really difficult, through the years, to put it in a Powerpoint presentation, as it invariably ends up looking pixelated and shitty when projected. So, for years, I’d been looking for a higher resolution image. But none existed anywhere on the Internet, anywhere. It was the strangest thing.

Three

Hence, I got in the habit of asking anyone I knew who might be going to Venice—”If you’re going to Saint Mark’s, see if you can get a photo of this mosaic!” I understand that I sounded maybe a bit like a crazy person. But whatever. You do what you gotta do. Regardless, no one ever came through anyway.

So you can of course believe that when Elizabeth and I finally made it to Venice over New Years, finding this mosaic and finally getting a good photo of it was one of the most important tasks I set for myself.

It was incredibly difficult.

Four

The first thing about Saint Mark’s Basilica is that is it just stunningly beautiful. And it is covered on every surface with absolutely jaw-dropping gold mosaics. It is truly one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever set foot in, and it lives up to the hype. And it’s huge—compared to the sometimes claustrophobic feeling of Venice with its alleyways and narrow spaces and tiny piazzas, the cathedral feels much bigger once you’re inside.

But all this makes finding any one mosaic difficult, because there’s simply so much. We spent the better part of half an hour scrutinizing every wall, backtracking, checking again, craning our necks at uncomfortable angles, hoping to find something we’d missed. It wasn’t terribly packed, which was lucky, but they still try to push you through a one-way path, so I was a bit sheepish about loitering as long as we did.

We found a lot of beautiful art, but we couldn’t find the relic theft mosaic anywhere.

Five

Eventually, we asked one of the security guards—yes, he said, it was near the altar. We looked. We couldn’t find it. We asked the security guard near the altar. He had no idea.

On the verge of giving up, I suddenly spotted it—distantly, on the second floor, on an arched ceiling, half-obscured by the pipe organ. Difficult to see in its entirety, but unmistakable.

We tried from a number of vantage points to get a clean photograph of it, but the organ was always in the way.

Perhaps it’s for the best. Sometimes the experience is worth more than a photo.

Besides, at some point over the past sixteen years, someone uploaded a good image to Wikipedia, anyway.