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Fiction By Yxta Maya Murray
Photography By Misha Gravenor For Metropolis
January 2003
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Visitors enter the cathedral behind the altar and pass through this
ambulatory to enter the nave.
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For more images, please see the January 2003 issue of Metropolis. If you
don't have an issue but would like to buy one, please contact us at
talk2us@metropolismag.com. |
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In the sixteenth century a friar named Diego de Landa came to the Americas to convert the
heathen to the Catholic faith. A man of culture and zeal, he entered the realm of the cinquecento Yucatan
Maya and completed the first phase of his mission by laying waste to their
art and books in a holocaust that was as profound as Caesar's burning of
the great library of Alexandria. Nude sculptures in basalt stone, temple
frescoes of jaguars and dragons, sacred jade carvings, books filled
with native hieroglyphics--all of these precious artifacts excited the interest
of Fray de Landa, who offered them passionately to a giant fire built
by his slaves. But the priest was a complex connoisseur, and watched the
jade icons shatter, the codices curl and blacken, the frescoes fox and scorch
with mixed pleasure. In some small holy region that remained in his heart,
de Landa regretted the desolation of so much treasure. And this is why,
while he annihilated the legacy of the Americas' ancestors, he simultaneously
recorded the Mayan language and described the vanquished Yucatan empire
in his 1566 study, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatan ("The
World of the Yucatan"). In that work de Landa writes almost lovingly
about the gorgeous native churches, altars, archives, reliefs, and friezes
that he burned to the ground. Even while he destroyed the architecture of
that society he knew it was sublime.
Downtown Los Angeles, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 2002.
When he saw the modest silver cross shining above the city, he thought
he had found his way back home. He had traveled far, and now moving through
the tangled, bright, antic machine of the metropolis, he pushed on, exhausted,
toward that symbol of Christ until he reached the threshold of the cathedral.
But as he descended onto the stone steps and gazed, weeping, up at the strange
and wondrous palace of the Lord, he knew that this was no church--or at
least that it was not like any church he had ever known.
He was--he had been--a man who strengthened his spirit with memories of
the Vatican's pure, white, gilded visage. The See's glowing marble steps,
Italian frescoes, shining colonnades, the gold-and-silver altar where Urban
VII and Clement VII had dipped their hands into argent bowls of holy water
and blessed oils--these reverent specters had kept his soul strong when
he had found himself a sole believer in the dark bush of America, where
no penitent kneeled before a Mary dressed in cloth of gold, where no votary
of rank might pray inside a chapel royal made lavish with painted cloths,
Flemish tapestries, crystal chalices.
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Building Facts
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels [2002]
Los Angeles, CA
Rafael Moneo
Client: Cardinal Roger Mahony
Moneo's design for the new Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, which
opened in September, takes cues from the pre-colonial culture of
southern Mexico and integrates them into a modern interpretation of the
Catholic liturgy--itself deeply indebted to the pagan traditions of
Western Europe. |
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Gliding up the steps, he passed into the plaza fronting the alien church,
then moved to the center of a vast buff-color square, built entirely of
humble stone and bordered by a garden composed of the palmy and tangled
trees that were indigenous to this primitive place. Enclosing the plaza
also were a series of glass windows etched with white winged angels, who
flew in the air with their lustrous robes flowing and their outstretched
arms reaching toward the heavens. Floating in this sand-tone space and greeted
by these fabulous heavenly creatures, he felt like one of the Lord's prophets
in the desert, a St. Jerome made holy and half-mad by the purity of the
Syrian dunes. He had always sought the comforts of rich and sumptuous chapels
for his worships; he had never found God's natural home in such foreign
atmospheres as a barbarian desert or jungle.
A long time ago he had been vested with the duty of introducing Christ into
that ragged realm, but discovered that its inhabitants were too distracted
by their own vivid idols and temples to see His face in the labyrinth of
vine-choked trees and prowling beasts. And so he had purged the jungle of
all these bad arts. He bade his men to destroy the jade icons of the were-jaguar,
the celestial dragon, and the various gods of indeterminate sex who ruled
the stars and the oceans and the rain and the sun. He had torn the brilliant
murals of Quetzalcoatl and Xochiteztal down from the savage chapels with
his own hands and consigned them to the flames. He had burned hundreds
of books. He had ripped the pagan poetry from their libraries and taught
his flock how to say God's name.
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The nave has fixed seating for 1,900 people, movable seating for an
additional 1,100, a cedar ceiling, and tapestries by painter John Nava.
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And what if these crafts had been lovely? What if they were made by artists
of invention and genius? For he could admit that they were. The idols had
been carved with the most delicate touch, the frescoes had been painted
in dazzling colors, and the books were fllled with wondrous ciphers.
But those luminous figures were dangerous to the pious eye. The jaguars
with their gleaming fangs and the flower goddesses with their dusky
miens tempted the dark regions of the soul. And the misshapen basalt-stone
sculptures of deities seemed like terrifying revenants from a fiery
and voluptuous hell. Only while praying inside the sublime churches of Madrid
and before the marble effigies of Jacopo della Quercia at San Petronio
could a penitent find holy inspiration.
So he fled the queer plaza and flew toward the cathedral to look
for God. He entered the doorways of the church, where he was greeted overhead
by a frieze dominated by a giant bronze effigy, a girl with closed
eyes and outstretched hands. She was surrounded in gold, and was so large
and beautiful she almost diverted him from his prayers. Yet hers was not
the smooth beauty of the Mary whom he knew--or even the Magdalene--for there
was a cast to her slanted features that resembled too much the faces he
had seen in the bush; she was Christ's mother, perhaps, or Dante's Beatrice,
but her high cheeks and tilted eyes revealed a taint in the blood he had
never seen in Michelangelo's or Titian's sacred paintings.
He moved through the doors--these too were bronze, impressed with rugged
if exquisite images of Mary in the attitude of prayer, and carved all about
with words and runes he could not discern. He drifted through a second set
of glass doors and into the great hallway, and again he was disturbed, for
this was a long spare corridor made of the same sand rock. The polished
floor gleamed in this cool and echoing passageway, which was nearly
empty of all design, all ornaments, all gilded motifs. The low music of
an unseen organ floated through the air; he heard whispers, children
crying; people passed by and brushed his robes, but they did not notice
him as he slipped noiselessly from the hall.
He entered into the great chapel and for the first time understood
that he would never find here the God's house that he had sought. Though
it was magnificent. This giant bright cave, this tall luminous cavern,
was hewn from that subtle rock and adorned here and there by arts that resembled
those he had once both burned and mourned. A lush, pale light streamed into
the room through windows built of opalescent stone; the pews were carved
from the most modest of woods. Brass trumpets and round lamps dangled from
the slatted ceiling. There were richly embroidered tapestries hung from
the stone walls; they showed saints and savages praying together. Bronze
cherubim also embellished the walls, and these had bizarre, cragged, magnificent
gold wings.
The ghost moved past these visions, through a pool of light, until he finally
saw the giant crucifix at the head of the church.
He drifted toward the deity.
This Christ, forged all of bronze and pierced to a plain white wood cross,
was a rough and wild martyr. His body was bent and raw and red-brown, like
the resplendent bodies of the idols sculpted by the Aztecs out of basalt
and obsidian. The face of Jesus betrayed an indeterminate blood and had
nearly a woman's fairness. The crown of thorns circled the elegant, coarse
head.
He could not help but be bewitched by so much beauty, even if it made him
worry about who had won the holy war he had waged in the wilderness. Echoes
of the divine and the pagan could be felt here, but the sun sifted down
from the quartz windows like a blessing, and the outlandish images had been
formed with such gentle skill. Now lonely, now dazzled, he bowed before
God with a stormy heart and tried to touch the holy feet with his shaking
hands.
He barely recognized Him.
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