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Updated: May 2, 2025
There are other mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, especially those in the apsis and in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar, with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the decline of the Renaissance.
Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His Parthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, and the last end of this Earth shall be no poison-cloud, I say to you, but Carnival and Harvest-home ... though ye have sinned, poor hearts ...
The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family.
This chapel, reared as a visible expression of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, is of the Byzantine and Renaissance type, a style frequently to be seen reflected from the lagoons of Venice. "The choir and transepts terminate in a circular domed apsis, and a large central dome rises at the intersection of the latter.
However, the cab was already entering the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which follows the Via Nazionale, these being the two piercings effected right across the olden city from the railway station to the bridge of St. Angelo. On the left-hand the rounded apsis of the Gesu church looked quite golden in the morning brightness.
The Byzantine epoch has left its imprint in the mosaics of the great nave and the apsis, and in its bloodless and lifeless Christs and Virgins, so many staring specters motionless on their gold backgrounds and red panels, the fantoms of an extinct art and a vanished society.
There is no creation except in a new field, that of science and mechanical inventions, where there is the most extraordinary and astonishing development of human genius ever seen on earth, but "of the earth earthy," aiming at material good. Architecture itself is turned into great feats of engineering. It does not span the apsis of a church; it spans rivers and valleys.
I knelt down to look at the inscription engraved upon that stone; and then, half aloud, I read in the shadow of the old apsis these words, which made my heart leap: "Cy-gist Alexandre, moyne de ceste eglise, qui fist mettre en argent le menton de Saint-Vincent et de Saint-Amant et le pie des Innocens; qui toujours en son vivant fut preud'homme et vayllant. Priez pour l'ame de lui."
At the entrance came the giant basins for holy water with their boy-angels as chubby as Cupids; then the nave, vaulted and decorated with sunken coffers; then the four cyclopean buttress-piers upholding the dome, and then again the transepts and apsis, each as large as one of our churches.
I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it: "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth TO MEN OF GOOD WILL!" It is not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic and human nature. This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group at the side of the 'scala santa', church of St. John Lateran, the Mother and Mistress of all the Catholic churches of the world.
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