The Architect: Art You Can Walk On
The art of architecture brings us practical creations both vast and tiny. Like most people, I’ve marveled at what the creative mind applied to a practical need can imagine, and then build. I’ve stood below the dome of a huge basilica and climbed the hundreds of steps to the top of a tower. I’ve also hiked up to the compact dwellings that were carved and built from the sandstone cliffs and I’ve driven by the practical tiny homes created as a community for the struggling among us.
Given the right space, materials, equipment, strong backs, and often, a lot of time, the architect can construct a work of art that will last centuries and meet needs for generations. Before the days of BIM software, modelers, and cloud collaboration, the creative’s tools were pen, paper, compass, level, ruler, plumb lines, and such. With these tools they could build both precise and very high.
But, what about building low, even low enough to walk on. Creatives have crafted mosaic art to adorned bath houses, palaces, fountains, and churches for millennia. Christian artists blended mosaics into their church floors, baptistries, and crypts within months of the Edict of Milan’s permission to legally erect church buildings.
This section of the Mosaic floor in Aquileia, Italy features common designs in their world include birds, flowers, and possible donors to the architectural project. Other sections include fishermen in boats with nets, fish, fruit, and the common things of life God had given His people.
The Basilica of Aquileia in the northeastern corner of Italy, is home to the largest Christian mosaic floor in the world (think: NBA court-sized). When I visited, I spent a day reading the mosaic writings in the cool crypts and walking the ancient pathways between buildings and ruins.
But mostly, I slowly walked around the mosaic floor built from tile and tesserae (squared stone fragments). This is the same floor where worshipers met, learned, and knelt for prayer beginning in 313 AD. I visualized how the greeters, ushers, bishops, preachers, and assistants walked these floors. I imagined being one of the Jesus-followers who came in to worship, blending in with the diverse aromas of fishermen and farmers, chefs and bakers, painters and weavers, husbands, wives and children.
And I would kneel in worship of the One True God, Jesus the Savior who rescued me from idolatry and hopelessness.
Christianity, for Aquileia, didn’t begin with the Mosaics. Tradition has Mark the Evangelist as the founder (though things like this are hard to prove.) The Mosaics are simply the art, and the architecture, that celebrated the life Jesus brought to their city.
Jesus reminded his disciples (and since John mentioned him not long afterwards, likely Mark) that the enemy will, if given the chance, steal, kill, and destroy them. Then, the Savior tells them (and us), “I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance.” That is the hope to which architects point with their creativity. That’s what the Mosaics celebrate!
(Verse from John 10:10, HCSB)