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| Photo courtesy of the web |
Also known as the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint
Paul, the Cathedral’s construction began in 1907 and was finished and
consecrated on September 29, 1990, eighty-three years after the initial laying
of the foundation stone.
Designed by architects George Frederick Bodley and Henry
Vaughn, and completed by architect Philip Herbert Frohman over his fifty year
tenure, the cathedral was built and carved by hundreds of stone cutters, wood
cutters, metal and glass artists, and other workers who built the great towers,
the flying buttresses, the crypt, carved gargoyles, grotesques, pinnacles, finials,
angels, and thousands of decorative details.
Some stone cutters and carvers hailed from the same part
of Italy, with its rich limestone, a material used by Italian builders for
their cities, cathedrals, palazzos, monuments, villas, and tombstones. The
stone carvers of the National Cathedral came from small towns in Italy as early
as 1890. And they all went to Barre, Vermont.
Roger Morigi, who studied at the Academia di Belle Arte
di Brera in Milan, arrived in New York harbor from Genoa in 1927. After years
of apprenticeship in Milan, Morigi became Master Carver at the Washington
National Cathedral in 1956 where he labored for twenty-three years until his
retirement. The last sculpture he carved was Adam. His major pieces are Majestus
(the centerpiece of the altar), the statue of the Good Shepherd, and Adam of
the west portal.
After Morigi’s retirement, Vincent Palumbo became Master Carver
in 1978. Vincent started as the youngest and most inexperienced member of the
crew, working with his father, Paul Palumbo. He worked at the Cathedral for “thirty-eight
years since he immigrated to the United States from southern Italy in 1961.”
(p. 77)
Vincent worked on the figures of Saint Paul and Saint
Peter on the Cathedral’s west façade. He spent two years with three other
carvers working on scaffolding above the Cathedral’s west entrance carving the Creation tympanum.
Frederick E. Hart created the famous base relief sculpture
Ex Nihilo (Out of Nothing) that
adorns the tympanum over the main entrance of the cathedral. It depicts “creation
of humanity out of the torrential void.” Four life-size males and four females
with closed eyes are “emerging from the primordial cloud,” a birth revealing
the “majesty of the Divine Will.”
Paul Palumbo carved the keystone of Christ on the Cross,
an unusual depiction of a very muscular Christ with oversized arms. Paul
Palumbo also carved sculptor Granville Carter’s Archangel Michael statue, located in a niche in the south transept
of the Cathedral.
Frank Zic and Roger Morigi worked for almost five years
carving forty-four voussoir angels in the south portal and ten years above the
south portal carving angels, canopies, and other sculptures.
Unfortunately, the stone carvers’ workshop, stone yard,
and studio no longer exist on the Cathedral’s grounds; they have been
demolished long time ago. According to
Marjorie Hunt, a folklorist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage, the workshop was a veritable “League of Nations,” with
carvers from all over Italy, Greece, England, Germany, and the United States.
I met Marjorie Hunt ten years ago at Georgetown
University. She had co-produced and co-directed The Stone Carvers, an Oscar-winning documentary about the stone
carvers she described in her 1999 book with the same title.
I toured the Cathedral with Marjorie Hunt as a guide but
I saw this jewel of architecture through my own eyes. While I understood and
admired the carving beauty built for posterity, the intricately sewn
needlepoint pillows in the pews, bearing the names of powerful men in Congress
and the Supreme Court, struck a strange chord with me.
What is so fascinating and unusual about this Cathedral
is the fact that the carvers had complete freedom in choosing pinnacles,
corbels, capitals, gargoyles, and grotesques.
The grotesques decorate buttresses supporting the nave.
According to Marjorie Hunt, carvings such as gargoyles, angels,
columns, pinnacles, and grotesques intertwine “the world of work” with hilarious
moments in time, pranks, jokes, stories, memorable characters, quirks of
various carvers, their habits and unusual traits of character, and the carvers’
imagination, using the world around them as inspiration:
-
a scholarly owl , a wild cat, a winged creature,
flowers, fish, pumpkins, sunflowers, carvers’ faces, the foreman, the laborer,
the engineer, the boss, a golfer’s grip
-
an image of Roger Morigi with his mallet and
chisels, with a mushroom cloud above his head and a devil’s tail and horn, signifying
his fiery temperament, and a set of golf clubs above his head, a symbol of his
extra-curricular passion
-
a pinnacle carving of Roger Morigi with his “beloved
golf clubs and the master carver’s eagle eye”
-
Vincent Palumbo, holding an air hammer, with exaggerated curly hair and moustache
-
one carver on the scaffolding whistles at the
passing girls while the next carving depicts the former dean of the Cathedral,
Francis B. Sayre Jr., with a horrified expression of shock and disapproval
-
Frank Zic carved himself “dreaming of deer hunting
and winning the Maryland lottery,” with a wishbone on his left side and a deer
antler on his right” (The Stone Carvers, p. 151)
-
Frank Zic carved Gino Bresciani, the trice
retiree, who was preparing for his fourth retirement with “a bag of money over
his shoulder and his suitcase in his left hand (p. 152)
-
Malcolm Harlow carved his family on the base of
a pinnacle
-
He also carved the caricatures of construction
laborers Allen Goodwin and Henry Thomas –
Goodwin with a chain hoist and dolly, Thomas with a cup of coffee, a doughnut,
hot dog, and piece of pie
-
Malcolm carved a tribute to all secretaries in a
grotesque, with telephone, typewriter, and file cabinet (a grotesque is a gargoyle
without a water spout)
-
A pinnacle with columns and Ionic capitals honors
the Cathedral sculptor Constantine Seferlis, a Greek
-
Richard Feller, the canon clerk, is depicted
with his drafting tools and the mountains from his native West Virginia
-
Ludwig Malisky, a carpenter, is portrayed with
his hammer and saw
-
Walter Fleming, the foreman of all Cathedral
laborers, is holding a whip wrapped around his head
-
There is even an angel holding an Oscar,
honoring Marjorie and the documentary The Stone Carvers that won an Academy
Award in 1985
-
Seferlis carved a hippie, an elephant, a donkey,
a lawyer, a television producer, an angry cat ready to pounce, a man riding a
stolen pig with a chicken in one hand, and a boy with a broken halo and his
hand in a cookie jar
-
Vincent Palumbo carved a good boy with a halo –
the two boys were carved at the special request of a Cathedral donor
-
A gargoyle was carved for a dentist, depicting him
working on the cavity of a walrus
-
John Guarante carved a lion roaring in anger and
pain because his tail was tied in a knot; his ninety-six angels with
overlapping wings and praying hands holding a dice with 7 encircle the central
tower (pp. 156-157)
A memorial to Joseph Ratti, who died falling from scaffolding,
was designed by sculptor Heinz Warneke and carved by Roger Morigi. There are
two uncarved blocks of stone on the north wall of the Cathedral, in the spot where
Ratti fell to his death. The statue depicts a stone carver working on an
unfinished gargoyle, a tribute to Joseph Ratti, but also a reminder of the
dangerous work involved in building the Cathedral.
The keystone of Mary Magdalene and Christ, located on the
nave’s vaulted ceiling, is the last carving that Vincent Palumbo and his father
worked on together before Paul Palumbo’s death.
The Washington National Cathedral is not just a symbol of
Christianity and the house of God; it is a “compendium of life and work
experiences, … a collection of texts that bear the imprint of the carvers’
hearts, hands, and minds.” (Marjorie Hunt, The Stone Carvers, p. 163)
It is sad that the Cathedral that bears the name of
George Washington and represents our Judeo-Christian nation has been
desecrated. What would the stone
carvers, devout Christians - Catholics, Lutherans, and Orthodox – think and
feel if they knew that their place of worship they spent almost a century to
build with blood, sweat, and tears, has been changed, even for a short moment
in history, into a mosque?
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