Siena Cathedral. From the University of Oklahoma.

Looking for Pope Joan in the Alchemical Cathedral

The Duomo in Siena is inseparably linked to the image of the city it crowns. It stands at the highest point of the great ridge the town is built upon, dome and campanile outlined by the early, pale light. Tile roofs crowd up at its marble-striped flanks, cascading down the hillside, hazily glimpsed in the morning mist. The whole city is built in some way in its form, as the main piazza, the grand, sloping Campo, is shaped like the curve of the Virgin's cloak. Yet, unlike beautiful Siena, there is something strange and unsettling about this mammoth Gothic structure.

I honestly don't remember much about my first trip to Siena as a child besides the fluttering Palio flags being sold by cart vendors along the Campo and an excellent hole-in-the-wall pizza place I never did find again. The Cathedral is equally blurry, and even the sketches in art history books make it hard to visualize. The only thing I could recall about it was some nebulous connection to the Pope Joan myth and some vague memory of crypto-pagan alchemical symbolism on the floor, the weird heritage of the Renaissance's unhealthy fascination with magic.

Even after my more recent visit there, it's difficult to grasp. Something is radically wrong with this glorious pinnacled structure.

For one thing, it's been turned into a museum. One crowded chapel in one side aisle, barricaded off by high partitions and entered via an impossible-to-find door is ghettoized for the sake of prayer. A bunch of garish Palio helmets and silver ex-votos to the Virgin cling to the underside of a nearby organ gallery.

The pavement had been recently restored, a marvelous maze of inlays in black marble, giallo antico and polished scarlet fitted into frames of white stone, and as a consequence, they have started charging admission for everyone to see it. It's quite striking, though perhaps improvidential: it's the only church in the world where one is supposed to be looking down at one's feet instead into the heavenly vaults above.

The endless wandering tourists with their prerecorded guides and the tables piled high with books towards the entrance further mar the scene. The fact that the sanctuary has not been marred by a versus populam new altar doesn't even serve as a relief because at least that could be a sign of life. We threaded through the cumbersome series of wooden partitions that snake along the floor of the church. Docents, rather than sacristans, told us not to sit on the step of a side chapel--people sat everywhere and anywhere during the Middle Ages--while tour groups tramped clumsily through the sanctuary, past the inlaid-wood stalls of the empty retrochoir.

It seemed suffocating. For once, the great wealth of gilded sepulchres and black-and-white striping, now pointless without a tabernacle, seemed overwhelming and even gaudy. It made no sense: why should this wealth of ornament that I would find magnificent anywhere else seem so troubling here? The iconography and decoration was no more dense or claustrophobic than any other Italian church, and actually quite severe next to the elegant baroque of Rome. We'd experienced it out-of-order, without the ritual progression up the nave towards the tabernacle and altar and instead had moved sideways across the aisles through the partition maze. This turned what should have been a glorious experience into an incoherent jumble of disconnected marbles and memories.

My fellow architecture students around me were strangely shocked by all this. Both by the money being chiseled out of the tourists and the money that had gone to building what would have been a glorious structure, if only if it had fulfilled its original purpose. It was truly bizarre: future architects being trained by one of the few programs in the world that cared about classical ornament were criticizing the only Institution on earth which had an infallible reason to decorate Her structures so lavishly. I tried to sputter a defense but I mostly wanted to leave.

The strange church was screwing with our heads. If you stepped back and set all this aside, it was still amazing. The wounds on the Body of Christ did not ultimately mar His beauty. But it was hard to look past them.

It's not just the barricades and the museumlike atmosphere that hangs over the place. It's simply strange. The splendidly-frescoed cathedral library has a large nude statue of the Three Graces in its center, while any church with alchemical symbols on its pavement has got to be a very odd place indeed. The Renaissance ideal was a splendid balance of classical and Christian but sometimes the scales got tipped the wrong way.

Even odder is that business about Pope Joan. There's an urban legend that says that the fictitious Pope Joan is included up in the rows of terra-cotta busts of the Popes that ring the frieze far overhead. It's not impossible as the medievals had, strangely, no hangups over the myth. It was only definitively disproved by, of all people, a Protestant historian of the sixteenth century. Anyway, I couldn't find her there. There seems to be a "Casa della Papessa" somewhere in Siena but my professors were mystified by what it was supposed to be and whether it had anything to do with this medieval dime-novel character.

There is, however, a pagan god inlaid on the floor. Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian composite of Mercury and Thoth, is shown teaching his disciples near the principal entrance. Perhaps they're talking about making lead into gold. Some ecclesial windowdressing said that he was actually an alias of Moses, with his Egyptian connections, but this hardly can be traced back to pious tradition. Trismegistus is the mythical author of the Renaissance occult-alchemical text known as the Corpus Hermeticum.

It's a seamier side of the quattrocento. It's hard to avoid when studying the era in-depth. The truth is, Renaissance science, freed from its ecclesiastical "restraints" often delved deeper into superstition, Gnosticism and magic than medieval researchers with their alleged tunnel-vision. Giordano Bruno, that supposed martyr of freethinking, was obsessed by the mystical properties of the Hebrew language, while the Tudor scholar John Dee held seances with angelic spirits in an Aztec obsidian mirror. Even Isaac Newton tried his hand at alchemy and wrote vast tracts on the weirder bits of the Apocalypse.

It's unsettling to see Hermes here, in a church. Even if, as my guidebook said, he is supposed to represent the beginnings of human knowledge, rather than as the emissary of some Gnostic divine in Neoplatonist disguise.

I said a prayer for the alchemists there, hoping their souls were in peace, hoping they recanted all their obsessed attempts to fuse Christianity with magic and heresy. And then I left that place.

There's some alchemy still going on there, too. While it should be of the sort that turns bread into God's body and wine into blood, instead it's about turning tickets into Euros. God's amazing house in Siena, even if He's stuck with Hermes and Pope Joan (wherever she is) for roommates, deserves better than this.