27 September 2023

Daily prayers in Ordinary Time
with USPG: (122) 27 September 2023

In the cloisters of the Church of San Michele in the Venetian Lagoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar, and this week began with the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XVI, 24 September 2023).

The Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today (27 September) remembers the life and witness of Vincent de Paul (1660), Founder of the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists).

Before the day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for prayer and reflection.

Later this week, the Church celebrates Saint Michael and All Angels (29 September). So my reflections each morning this week and next are taking this format:

1, A reflection on a church named after Saint Michael or his depiction in Church Art;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

The Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, designed by Mauro Codussi in 1469, was the first Renaissance church in Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

San Michele, Venice:

Venice is a collection of islands linked by canals and bridges, interconnected by narrow alleyways, squares of all shapes and sizes and the vaporetti or water buses. While tourists find their way from Rialto to San Marco, or from Cannaregio to Giudecca, few move beyond the main highlights found in their guidebooks.

More discerning visitors may spend a few hours in the islands of the lagoon, especially the Lido, Torcello and Murano and Burano.

But the smaller islands are generally missed, and few make it in any great numbers to the Isola di San Michele, a former prison island that takes five or ten minutes to reach by water bus, half-way between Fondamente Nuove on Cannaregio and the island of Murano on vaporetto routes 41 and 42.

Perhaps they are deterred by the name of the vaporetto stop for San Michele: Cimitero. For this has been Venice’s cemetery since the early 1800s, when the occupying Napoleonic forces told the Venetians to start taking their dead across the water instead of burying them in Venice itself.

It was all in the name of hygiene and because of a growing shortage of burial places.

The lagoon was once the preserve of fishermen and hunters, and the stories of the islands is shrouded in myth and legend. Murano is the island of glassmakers and Burano the island of lace, but other islands were monasteries, used as prisons and gunpowder factories, or serving as market gardens or cemeteries.

Cimitero, with a large number of cypress trees and enclosed within high terracotta walls, was originally the two islets of San Michele and San Cristoforo della Pace.

The Hermits of the Camaldolese Order moved onto the island in the 12th century, and founded the Monastery of Saint Michael (San Michele di Murano), which became a centre of learning and printing. The famous cartographer, Fra Mauro, who drew maps that helped European explorers, was a monk of this community.

The landmark building on the island is the Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, designed by Mauro Codussi in 1469. This was the first Renaissance church in Venice, and the first church in Venice to be faced in white Istrian stone.

But the monastery was suppressed by French forces under Napoleon, in the course of their conquest of the Italian peninsula, and the monks were expelled in 1814. The Napoleonic administration decreed that burial on the main islands of Venice was unsanitary, and these two small islands then became Venice’s major cemetery. The canal separating the two islands was filled in between 1837 and 1839, and the larger island became known as San Michele.

Jan Morris, in The World of Venice, compares the cemetery island to a ship where ‘the director stands as proudly in his great graveyard as any masterful cruiser captain, god-like on his bridge.’

The cemetery is wide and calm, with a series of large gardens, studded with cypress trees and cluttered with hundreds of thousands of tombs and graves. Some are lavishly monumental, with domes and sculptures and wrought-iron gates; many more are stacked in high modern terraces, like filing cabinets.

Most of San Michele is reserved for Catholics. Walls separate the different areas, and the graves lie in neat, tightly-packed, serried rows, separated by paths. Some graves are neglected, but most are well-tended, often with recently-laid flowers.

The island also has two smaller, separate graveyards for other Christians. Those who are buried in the Greci or Greek Orthodox cemetery include the composer Igor Stravisky (1882-1971) and the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929). Venice has always had a sizeable Greek population, and here too are the graves of bishops, merchants and refugees who fled Smyrna in the 1920s.

In the Evangelisti or Protestant graveyard are the graves of the American poet and critic, and fascist collaborator, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who influenced the work of TS Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and of Pound’s mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge (1895-1996). Here too are the graves of the Russian and American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), and the German painter August Wolf (1842-1915).

One gravestone has an awkwardly-composed inscription: ‘In loving memory of Frank Justice Stanier of Staffordshire who left us in peace, Febry 2nd 1910.’ His family lived at Madeley Manor, Staffordshire, and at Moor House, Biddulph. Another gravestone is of Edward Douglas Guinness (1893-1983), a member of the banking branch of the family and a partner in Guinness Mahon.

In contrast to the formal, tended graves and gardens of graves in other parts of the cemetery, the Greci and Protestant sections have an atmosphere of rustic decay. Some tombstones are covered in moss, a few are leaning over, and others are collapsing.

The Chiesa di San Michele in Isola was designed by Mauro Codussi and built ca 1469. This is the first Renaissance church in Venice, and the church and the monastery also served for a time as a prison.

The other churches and chapels on the islands include cemetery church of San Cristoforo, designed by Gian Antonio Selva (1751-1819), the Cappella Emiliana chapel, and a small Greek Orthodox funeral chapel.

If San Michele is not crowded by living tourists, it is certainly crowded by dead Venetians. It is so crowded that graves are on short-term leases. The bodies in each row of graves are allowed to decompose for 12 years, and are then dug up.

When families could not pay for reburial, the bones of the dead are taken to the ossuary island of Sant’Ariano, near Torcello. That island is described vividly by Michael Dibdin in his novel Dead Lagoon. Today, after a respectful passage of time, bones are transferred to small metal boxes in tall grey cement-block piles that look more like gigantic filing cabinets.

Does the name of the vaporetto stop at Cimitero deter visitors to San Michele? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Luke 9: 1-6 (NRSVA):

1 Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. 3 He said to them, ‘Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money – not even an extra tunic. 4 Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. 5 Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.’ 6 They departed and went through the villages, bringing the good news and curing diseases everywhere.

Ballet shoes on the grave of the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev on the cemetery island of San Michele in the Lagoon of Venice (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayer:

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Flinging open the doors.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday by the Revd Anthony Gyu-Yong Shim, Diocese of Daejeon, Korea.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (27 September 2023) invites us to pray:

Let us pray for churches re-opening – that their doors will be flung open to welcome in all who seek the Lord.

The church and the monastery of San Michele also served for a time as a prison (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Collect:

Merciful God,
whose servant Vincent de Paul,
by his ministry of preaching and pastoral care,
brought your love to the sick and the poor:
give to all your people a heart of compassion
that by word and action they may serve you
in serving others in their need;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

Merciful God,
who gave such grace to your servant Vincent de Paul
that he served you with singleness of heart
and loved you above all things:
help us, whose communion with you
has been renewed in this sacrament,
to forsake all that holds us back from following Christ
and to grow into his likeness from glory to glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The graves of Igor and Vera Stravinsky on San Michele (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

The graves of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Modern design at
Euston seeks to make
heraldry relevant to
art and tastes today

Art and design on the London Underground has always caught my eye and ear (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

Euston Station was the first mainline and underground station in London that I got to know in my teens and early 20s. In a typical year, more than 40 million journeys start or end at this station.

Back in the late 1960s and the 1970s, this was the station I arrived at in London from Lichfield or after taking the ferry from Dublin. In my teens, I hitch-hiked most of the time, and train travel was a luxury until I was in my 20s. By then, Euston had become familiar and was convenient. These days, this is the station I arrive at on trains from Milton Keynes.

Euston Station opened in May 1907 as part of the City and South London Railway’s extension from Angel Station. The architect Sidney Smith designed the entrance at Euston station.

A few months later, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened its own Euston Station, with a surface structure designed by the architect Leslie Green. Despite having separate entrances, the two stations shared an underground ticket hall.

The station was closed 100 years ago, from 1922 to 1924, to allow tunnels to be enlarged in preparation for both branches of the Northern Line joining at Camden.

The station was rebuilt in the mid-1960s, when the surface mainline station was built. Most of the Underground work was designed to accommodate the Victoria line, which began calling at the station in 1968, just as I was about to get know the station.

Tom Eckersley’s designs and illustrations on the Victoria line platforms recall the Euston Arch (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Art and design on the Underground have always caught my eye and ear, from the buskers to Tom Eckersley’s designs and illustrations on the Victoria line platforms in Euston of the Euston Arch that once stood as the gateway to the mainline station. The Doric Arch is also commemorated in the name of a pub between the station and Euston Square.

Going back to my teens, I have long had an interest in heraldry, and I remain curious about the abstract graphic patterns that I see regularly on the Northern Line (Charing Cross branch) platforms in Euston. They were created in the 1980s by the designers David Hamilton and Robin Cooper to represent the coat of arms of the Dukes of Grafton, whose family home is at Euston Hall in Sffolk. Grafton Regis, the village in the south Northamptonshire that gives its name to the title of the Dukes of Grafton, is about 13 km south of Northampton and 14 km north of Milton Keynes.

To many, heraldry must seem anachronistic, even feudal, if not irrelevant. Some of the conventions in heraldry are misogynist and crassly classist and need updating and modernisation. But the inspirational adaptations of the Euston or Grafton arms by Hamilton and Cooper in Euston Station show heraldry can still inform art and design.

David Hamilton and Robin Cooper created the abstract graphic patterns on the Northern Line platforms in Euston Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The design in Euston Station is based on the coat of arms of Henry FitzRoy (1663-1690), 1st Earl of Euston, an illegitimate son of King Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland.

The Duke of Grafton’s shield shows the Royal Stuart arms, with supporters, based on the royal lion and the Tudor greyhound. Across the shield is a baton sinister denoting illegitimate birth. The Earl of Euston was later given the title of Duke of Grafton and his coat-of-arms, seen on the platforms in Euston Station, is still used by his descendants.

The land on which the main line station is the situated was the property of the FitzRoy family. The family name and titles associated with it are to be found in the names of streets and squares in the surrounding area, including Euston Road, Euston Street, Euston Square, Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square, Fitzroy Street and Grafton Street.

Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, was only 27 when he died in Ireland on 9 October 1690 of a wound received at the storming of Cork while leading William's forces, less than three months after the Battle of the Boyne.

His son, Charles FitzRoy (1683-1757), 2nd Duke of Grafton, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1721 to 1724, and gave his name to Grafton Street and Duke Street in Dublin.

The V6 Grafton Street is a major local road in Milton Keynes key to the layout and urban form of the 'new city'. It starts beside Wolverton railway station in the north-west of Milton Keynes, between Wolverton and New Bradwell, and extends as far as Denbigh, where it provides access to the Stadium:mk and where it terminates in a roundabout with the H10 Bletcham Way, V4 Watling Street and Denbigh Road.

The Dukes of Grafton have given their names to Grafton Street in Dublin and in Milton Keynes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)