Honoring the Blessed Sacrament with the Best Blue Jeans

The English word “jeans” derives from “Gênes”, the French name for the Italian city of Genoa. Back when the Republic of Genoa was a major mercantile power, (and long before blue jeans were popularized in America by Mr Strauss), cloth dyed with indigo was one of the city’s major products. Since it was both difficult and expensive to make, it was considered a luxury material. Led by the Catholic instinct that rightly seeks to give the best of everything to God, in 1538, a Genovese abbey commissioned a set of 14 pieces of cloth dyed blue with indigo, and then decorated with images of the Passion painted in white lead. The cloths were designed to be set up over a frame which made a temporary chapel for the repose of the Blessed Sacrament on Holy Thursday; the image are copied from a series of engravings of the Passion made by Albrecht Dürer in 1508-12. These pieces are now on display in the diocesan museum of Genoa, from which we published some other pictures on Wednesday, and according to the museum’s website, are the only known examples of their kind.

Beneath the pictures of the blue jeans chapel are some pictures of some rooms within the museum which were formerly part of the residence of the cathedral canons.

The front of the chapel shows the Crucifixion at top; at the lower left, the Virgin Mother with Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Cleophas, St John, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus; at the lower right, the Christ with the cross amid the soldiers.

One of the two sides, with the Agony in the Garden, Judas’ suicide at the left, and the rest of the Apostles at the right.

On the other side, clockwise from the lower left, Christ before Caiaphas, the mocking of the soldiers, and the Ecce Homo.

Judas’ kiss, St Peter attacking one of the soldiers, and the young man fleeing from the scene (traditionally believed to be St Mark, who alone narrates this fact (14, 51-52.)

The Deposition from the Cross

Details of the sections show above.

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The Diocesan Museum of Genoa (Part 1)

Following up on some recent posts about the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa and its museum (museum part 1; part 2; cathedral), here are some pictures from the diocesan museum. This first part will focus on paintings and altar frontals. Genoa is one of the most important ports in Italy, and during its time as an independent republic, was a major cloth importer; much of the material brought to the city was used for making vestments and other ecclesiastical decorations. We start, however, with two very nice paintings of the Virgin Mary, the better to celebrate the octave of the Assumption.    

The Madonna and Child with the Two Lazaruses, ca. 1520, by Pietro Francesco Sacchi, from the church of St Lazarus in Genoa, now demolished. The Lazarus on the left is the brother of Martha and Mary Magdalene, who according to a later medieval tradition, ended his days as the bishop of Marseilles; the other is the leper of the Gospel known as Dives and Lazarus, Luke 16, 19-31.

The Deposition from the Cross, also ca. 1520 by Sacchi; from the church of St Mary and Ss Nazarius and Celsus, the parish church of the Multedo neighborhood.

Two altar frontals.

An altar frontal for Lent and Passiontide, with a central Pietà, and Ss John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene to either side; Flemish workmanship of the later 16th or early 17th century.

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The Cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa, Italy

Following up on two recent posts of photographs by Nicola de’ Grandi of the treasury museum of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa (part 1; part 2), here are some pictures which he took of the church itself. Of course, as the cathedral of a city which was not just a major port, but the capital of an independent republic for nearly seven centuries, it is a very complex and richly decorated space, and here we can get no more than a glimpse of it.

Like so many of Italy’s great churches, the building is a palimpsest of the many different phases of its history. Construction began in the northern Italian Romanesque style in 1098, and the church was consecrated by Pope Gelasius II on October 10, 1118. Starting in about 1230, however, it was restructured in the Gothic style, most evidently in the three portals of the façade, and then heavily restored after a major fire in 1296. (The bishop of Genoa at the time of the fire was the Bl. Jacopo di Voragine, the author of the famous Golden Legend.) The incomplete left bell-tower had a loggia built on top of it in 1455, in the simple style of the Renaissance, and the upperpart of the right tower was added in 1522.

Over the central door, a relief of Christ with the symbols of the four Evangelists, and the martyrdom of St Lawrence, the cathedral’s titular Saint and one of the city’s patrons.

The Gothic interior has had many decorations of the Renaissance and Baroque periods added to it; in the ceiling of the choir, a fresco of the martyrdom of St Lawrence by Lazzaro Tavarone, and in the apse, his trial before the Roman emperor, by the same artist, both done in 1622. In the same period, the sanctuary was completely redecorated in the Baroque style.

The Sacrament chapel, to the left of the main choir, rebuilt in the Neo-Classical style in 1817-18.

In the left transept, the monument of the Cybo family, one of the most important families of the Genovese Republic, executed from 1533-37 by Giacomo and Gulielmo della Porta. The Pope at the bottom is a member of the family, Innocent VIII, who reigned from 1484-92.

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The Treasury Museum of Genoa Cathedral (Part 2)

Here is the second part of Nicola’s photos of the treasury museum of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa. We begin with several pictures of a silver ark for the Corpus Christi procession, made in the mid-16th to early 17th century; the base is decorated with images of the Lord’s Passion, from the Last Supper to the Burial, alternating with statues of the Apostles.

These two reliquaries were brought to the Republic of Genoa from its mercantile colony at Pera, just outside the walls of Constantinople: one of the 11th or 12th century, with the arm of St Anne...

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The Treasury Museum of Genoa Cathedral (Part 1)

Thanks once again to our Ambrosian writer Nicola de’ Grandi for sharing with us another splendid collection of photos, this time from the treasury of the cathedral of St Lawrence in Genoa, which has a number of really remarkable artistic treasures. 

This chalcedony dish, which is indeed a piece of Roman work made in the first century, is traditionally said to be the very one on which the head of St John the Baptist was presented to Salome, as read in Mark 6. The metalwork with the head of the Baptist was added in the 15th century.

Various stories recount that the bones of St John the Baptist were burnt at some point, either by “infidels” when they occupied the city where he was buried, or by the faithful, so they could be more easily concealed from either infidels or iconoclasts. (This story is included in the Golden Legend by Jacopo da Voragine, who was archbishop of Genoa, and repeated by his contemporary William Durandus.) Either way, the cathedral possesses a portion of the ashes; this processional ark was made for them in 1438-45.

The ark is decorated with these highly detailed reliefs of the major episodes of John the Baptist’s life: the Annunciation to his father Zachariah, and the Visitation,

his birth and naming,

an angel (sometime said to be the mysterious fourth archangel Uriel) leads him out into the desert as a youth (a popular but apocryphal story), 

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