We’re standing barefoot on the beach at the water’s edge. Little waves arrive, one after the other, to lap gently over our feet. Each one comes from the same ocean, and each one is different, coming from a slightly different direction, with perhaps more or less urgency than the last, depending on the tides.
These little waves are the domes that I have visited on you. With Saint Simeon (Weeks 1& 2, Part III) we had—in the beginning anyway—a void where the dome would be; the saint himself took the place of the gilded and glittering dome that represented heaven for the Byzantine Christians. Agnes (Week 3) has a dome in her church, which was associated in part with Renaissance and Baroque theory, and we’ll touch on that topic this time too. Paul (Week 4) had an important dome that was linked to his obsession with Bramante, mathematics, and Latin. Domes were unheard of in Ireland for Brigid (Week 5), but they did exist for Leander (Week 8), even though they played second fiddle to the horseshoe arched openings. Each of these domes has had a slightly different story, and we are about to embark on yet another dome species with the seventeenth-century Chapel of Saint Casimir in the Cathedral of Vilnius, Lithuania. This dome belongs to the family of Pictorial Paradise Domes, in which paradise is presented to you as a dreamy, cumulus-cloud filled sky supported by cherubs and seraphim. Think of those elaborately sugar-coated, pastel-colored Easter eggs with viewing ports; soon to be at a market near you (Easter being five weeks away).
Domes like these developed big time in during the seventeenth century (the Baroque Period) in central and northern Europe. If you were the architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Shulz, you might argue that it was the climate and geography; the forests of these areas that made these domes what they were. All the detail of a dark timbered hillside, where the rushing and capricious rivulets of water are by turns visible and hidden beneath ferns and fallen logs under which little creatures live; this richness was reflected in the incredible complexity of the sculpted plaster and the painted surfaces filled with gamboling cherubs and other creatures. And the blue skies and fluffy clouds? They were so rarely visible from the forest, so why not create them as a painted paradise of the desired Other? The plans of many of these churches became forest-like too, with undulating walls and attached columns and piers that were painted to enhance the masquerade. The sturdy wing walls that were part of the Roman basilica plan promoted by Serlio and adopted by the Jesuits in their mother church of Il Jesù (built 1568-1576 in Rome) became the trembling wandpfeiler of the German hall-church.
The three churches in Vilnius, Lithuania associated with Saint Casimir all exhibit these northern Baroque characteristics in one way or another. The Cathedral is the oldest, and it is in Casmir’s chapel there that the Baroque really shines. But there is also the Church of St. Casimir, built in 1604 by the Jesuits. You would be forgiven in thinking that it contains his chapel and relics if you are poking around on the Internet, but I assure you it does not. The third church is that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, where Casimir’s sarcophagus was stored from 1956 to 1989, and for Baroque splendor, that is the church you want to see (website below). My story, however, is about the Cathedral and Casimir’s chapel there, because it was his resting place and I like its architectural backstory.
Casimir (1458-1484) used his short time on earth for good works and is now the patron saint of both Poland and Lithuania. He is especially loved in Lithuania, as he is the only Lithuanian saint in the pantheon of Roman Catholic saints. His feast day is celebrated throughout Lithuania, and the United States as well, where there are many communities of Lithuanians and Poles; with fairs known as Kaziuko muges, or “Little Casimir Fairs,” which feature crafts, folk dances, and heart-shaped cookies called muginukus. Like Valentine’s Day cookies and candy, they are decorated with names, and you will find a recipe in the Website called “saints/feast/family” listed below.
Casimir may be remembered with folk fairs, but he was a prince, the son of King Casimir IV, who was king of both Lithuania and of Poland, and Princess Elizabeth of Austria. I’m going to guess that this royal couple liked each other, because they had a total of twelve children. Our Casimir is reputed to have been a sweet and gentle soul—his character was interpreted thus in the design of his chapel anyway, as we shall see—and shortly after his death he was credited with the miracle of deterring the Russian army invasion of 1518. Casimir was born into a country that had become one of the most powerful in Europe, and was constantly on the watch for its ambitious neighbors, the bête noire of Russia to the east (the Russians never gave up), and the Ottoman Empire to the south. Casimir was asked at the tender age of thirteen, in 1471, to help his neighbors in Hungary defeat the invading Ottoman Turks who had thrown over Constantinople just eighteen years before, and the Hungarians promised him a crown if he succeeded, but the campaign failed. Incidentally, the overthrow of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in the name changing to Istanbul and the Hagia Sofia becoming a mosque, which it remained until 1931. 926 years as a Christian church, 478 years as a mosque, and 89 years as a museum until it became a mosque again. And so it goes.
Casimir proved in the end to be a good ruler and loved by all, but he had a frail constitution and he died in Lithuania at the age of 26. He was buried in 1484 in the cathedral of Vilnius, and his reputation for miracles drew increasing numbers of pilgrims; a meditation on the portrait of him with three hands did the trick for many. In 1521 the process of his canonization was begun, and he officially became a saint in 1602, or other dates depending on your source, but no real matter to us (and you thought you were waiting a long time for your vaccine!). What does matter to our story is that, about 1636, Eustachas Valavičius, the Bishop of Vilnius, and Sigismund III Vasa, the King of Poland, decided to build a chapel for the recently sainted Casimir at the Cathedral of Vilnius, and this chapel gives us the opportunity to expand on a number of themes already discussed and explore some new ones as well.
The Cathedral of Vilnius had been, like many a site for a Christian church, a place of worship for other deities—in this case the Baltic god Perkūnas—long before Christianity was adopted in Lithuania in 1387. The first Christian building was a three-nave cathedral built c.1251 by a king who had adopted Christianity before it was widespread, and when he died in 1263, Perkūnas moved back in. A little over 100 years later, Perkūnas had to move out again as Christianity became the state religion. This cathedral was like most in that other way too; it burned, was hit by lightning, and needed expansion, and so went through many iterations. It had its Gothic moment, a modest one during which it was not much more than a boring little shoebox with a tiny round tower in each corner and various chapels poking out of its sides here and there as the money came in. During its Renaissance phase it was fitted out with classical details and entablatures which ordered its chaos, and it was in this state when Casimir’s chapel was built. What you see today is a neo-Classical make-over from 1783 almost worthy of the German architect Karl Schinkel (1781-1841), someone we’re bound to meet later this year.
The three main characters in the story of Casimir’s chapel are Eustachas Valavičius, the Bishop of Vilnius, Sigismund III Vasa, the King of Poland, and Constantino Tencalla, the Italian master mason (read: architect and builder). The Bishop and the King were among the most powerful men in Europe of the seventeenth century, and they took seriously their charge of creating a shrine for the recently sainted and tremendously popular Casimir. Tencalla for his part, had, like many of his northern Italian compatriots, highly desirable craftsmanship skills that enabled him to find work at prestigious sites such as the ongoing project of Saint Peter’s in Rome (that one extended from Bramante’s initial design of 1505 to Bernini’s finishing touches in 1680). He also had an uncle in the King’s court.
Tencalla was given a mind-boggling program for this little chapel of about 1000 square feet by his team of employers. They wanted to emulate Renaissance geometries as seen in the sacristies of San Lorenzo in Florence, but they also wanted an elaborately decorated interior à la Pietro Cataneo, who had written a treatise on architecture (writing these treatises was all the rage in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries) in which he argued that churches were as bodies and souls, the exterior being the body and the interior the soul, and since everyone knew that souls were more beautiful than bodies (neo-Platonic thought at work here) the church interior should be “beautiful,” whatever that meant to the client, and in this case it meant over-the-top decoration. The King and Bishop also had knowledge of a treatise written by two Spanish Jesuits ((Juan Bautista Villalpando and Jeronimo del Prado); a three-volume work on the design of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, based on the lengthy description in the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament. This “Vision of the New Temple,” starting with Chapter 40, goes on for three chapters with detailed lists of measurements, materials, and decorations, and the specifications leave you in no doubt as to where the carved cherubim and palm trees should be placed. Our seventeenth-century Jesuits were hardly the first to have discovered these Biblically authoritative building formulas, but that’s another story. And finally, our prestigious clients wanted to find an architectural order fitting to the sex and nature of Casimir, and they wanted to reflect sartorial tastes in vogue. Our sympathies go to Mr. Tencalla!
Tencalla went for Biblical rigor in laying out the plan, using the twenty cubits described in Ezekiel for the inner sanctum of the Temple of Jerusalem, translated into Italian bracchia. In case you haven’t been thinking about cubits lately, a cubit is the distance from your elbow to your middle finger, and don’t begin to wonder how that measurement was standardized! Tencalla used Italian braccio because that system had status; it was used at the most important Italian Renaissance sites. And, because the standardized metric system wouldn’t be common until 1795, using local Lithuanian measurement systems would have resulted in a veritable Tower of Babel.
In volume, Tencalla’s goal was to re-create the inner sanctum of Solomon’s Temple, the Holy of Holies, which is described as being a cube—“cube-it!”—measuring twenty cubits on each side, or 8,000 cubic cubits? I’ll let you do the math. But there was more than that. Our builder could not ignore the hegemony of the Renaissance starchitects who put Platonic geometry in the service of the Church. For them, the perfect church reflected three perfect forms stacked one atop the other: the cube as the base, a cylindrical drum, and a hemispherical dome above. The transition from the cube to the cylinder was often facilitated by an octagonal ring, and the dome was usually finished off with a little lantern, an irresistible piece of candy which let in the mysterious heavenly light that wasn’t normally allowed to enter through windows in the side walls. These Renaissance buildings were testaments to human Reason with a capital R. If the architect Brunelleschi didn’t exercise his ability to reason and decide for himself what was aesthetically perfect, what kind of example would he be of the gifts God had given him?
At the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo in Florence, in 1421, Brunelleschi had added a chapel to the west corner of the building that exemplified his ideas about Renaissance geometry, and that also approximates the Biblical dimensions Tencalla was working with; this is called the “Old” Sacristy. Slightly more than 100 years later, Michelangelo had his turn, and built the “New” Sacristy on the east side of the building, respecting Brunelleschi’s precedent but clearly stating his preferences for an architecture parlante, a bold and sculptural architecture that joked around with classical vocabulary and with scale. For those of you who have been to Florence and seen the Laurentian Library stairs in this building you know exactly what this is about. For those of you who haven’t yet seen this building, please put it on your list for When We Can Travel Again.
But even Michelangelo’s enriched interpretation of the ascetic purity of Brunelleschi doesn’t come close to the extravagance we find in Casimir’s chapel. The Bishop and the King may have been eager to replicate the dimensions found at San Lorenzo, but hey, Ezekiel and the Bible condoned Bling, and they wanted to make a splash. Before they could dress things up, though, they had to choose an architectural order. You may remember how the English Baroque architects struggled with this problem, as in England, the orders were all mixed up with sex, religion, and politics. Here it was a bit simpler—the Lithuanians were religiously tolerant—but sex did play a part. Our building team did due diligence and consulted the treatises of Vitruvius and Serlio, which pre-dated John Shute in England and were more common on the continent in any case. They needed help because their case was a bit complicated; Casimir had been such a gentle soul, and so the aggressive and masculine Doric and Tuscan orders just didn’t seem right for him. Serlio delivered them with his advice to use the Ionic Order as being appropriate for “male Saints whose lives were half-way between robust and delicate.”
As built, Casimir’s chapel admirably unified all these winds of influence. From the exterior, the building approaches a Brunelleschi knock-off with its austere stone facing and clarity of geometry. Inside the “soul” however, it’s more like having entered the belly of a well-marbled cow who swallowed her fillings, and since I can’t begin to do justice to the confection in a drawing, here’s a great little video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtHIwgPogFo.
The walls of the cube are finished in red and black marble, and the red marble is “well-marbled” with white (remember Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress?). The black marble trim was chosen as a status symbol; black was very in vogue with the wealthy of the seventeenth-century. For clothing, black was the most expensive dye to be had, and it did a wonderful job of highlighting your jewelry. The Italians, usually at the forefront of the fashion game, were still sporting gay colors when they arrived in the Spanish court to see everyone in the new, elegant black. They hustled back to their sewing machines, got to work on a set of standards for the design conscious, and now any architect worth their salt has a wardrobe full of black clothing designed by Italians. And just as black clothing begged for silver and gold accents, the chapel is fitted out with same, the main event being the silver sarcophagus of Casimir, and more on that below.
Now to enter paradise, we must look up, above the black marble entablature that terminates the cube to the arches, pendentives, and dome, where the sugar begins to spin. In perfect Northern Baroque form, white plaster icing piped around the base of the dome envelops paintings of cherubs and clouds, which sometimes break through the confection with their enthusiasm for paradise. The circular drum supporting the dome continues the celebration, and then the dome itself reverts to a Brunelleschi-like pietra serena grey color with white ribs; now that you’ve had your fun, let’s calm down, gang.
Back down to earth, and the silver sarcophagus of Casimir. This elaborate container for the body of the saint was not always here, and would have been displayed as a good example of the evils associated with religion in the Communist Museum of Atheism that was created nearby in 1956, had the sarcophagus not been moved to the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul for safekeeping. It was returned to the Cathedral after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Lithuania and all the Baltic States experienced dramatic shifts in fortune in the twentieth century. In World War II, Lithuania was occupied first by the Nazis and then by the Russians. The Russians turned the Cathedral of Vilnius into a warehouse and museum. The Church of Saint Casimir, which had been changed into a Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century, became an Evangelical Lutheran temple for a garrison under the Germans in World War I, was returned to the Catholics after the war, but damaged so substantially in World War II that it was closed until 1963 when it became a Museum of Atheism. Somehow the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, where Casimir’s sarcophagus was stashed, escaped damage and continued to serve as a church. Under the Soviets churches were allowed to stay open if they could support themselves, but they were always under close scrutiny.
Happily, Casimir continues to repose peacefully in his sarcophagus in the Cathedral. He offers satisfaction to all in death just as he seemed to have done in life: he has a chapel fit for a king, in which visitors can feel transported to heaven by the Baroque splendor found there, and he is remembered each year on March 4 with fairs celebrating the perhaps humbler but no less transporting aspects of eastern European folk life.
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References for Week 9: Casimir
Websites
This is a great website—if you scroll down a bit—for images of Kaziuko muges in Vilnius and the recipe for the (cookies). But watch out, because you will get the impression that Casimir’s chapel is in the church pictured here, which is the Church of Saint Casimir, and not the Cathedral. I think that the problem was one of translation—the word “church” was used instead of “chapel.”
https://www.saintsfeastfamily.com/copy-of-st-casimir-march-4-1
Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Vilnius:
https://www.inspirock.com/lithuania/vilnius/church-of-st-peter-and-st-paul-a111050211
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Kee, Howard Clark, Ed. The Cambridge Annotated Study Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Zygas, K. Paul. “The Spirit of Austerity and the Materials of Opulence: Architectural Sources of St. Casimir’s Chapel in Vilnius,” in Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2000), pp 5-43.
Sorry or the french langage: l'extrême compétence de Catherine nous ouvre des perspectives dont le "plouc" que je suis n'aurait pas eu idée ! Son intérêt pour les saints aura toujours de nouveaux terrains à parcourir. Le modeste berrichon auvergnat limousin, attiré par la Bretagne, que je suis pourra lui suggérer des saints peut-être inconnus d'elle: sainte Solange, sainte Florine, saint Ferréol, saint Genou, saint Tugdual, saint Nectaire....