Wednesday, August 11
As it was St. Lawrence's day yesterday, I feel obliged to follow Don Jim's lead and post a link about the Escorial, the massive palace-monastery-university dedicated to St. Lawrence and built in the shape of the gridiron which roasted him to death. I've seen the original gridiron, which preserved in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome. I have a great fascination with its namesake edifice: in fact, my tiny dorm room at Notre Dame I've nicknamed the Escorial as well.
It (the monastery, not my dorm room) was built by Philip II of Spain, a fascinatingly morbid individual who might have been a Goth in another epoch (the pretentiously creepy subculture, not the pillaging tribe) but instead channeled his gloom into a more fruitful Catholic outlet, commissioning some rather striking black-and-silver skull-emblazoned vestments for his own Requiem mass.
San Lorenzo del Escorial is a mammoth building, replete with Solomonic imagery--indeed, aging idol Tyrone Power died there while filming the biblical epic Solomon and Sheba on location back in the black-and-white era. The place's stark, stripped aesthetic is in marked constrast with the Baroque I love, but yet its severe geometries nonetheless have an overpowering bare splendor to them. Indeed, the cube repeated in the Temple's geometry appears in the frescoed vaults as a symbol of Divine perfection rather than the more conventional Pythagorean sphere. Even weirder is that in the palace's relics collection is a bizarre yard-long feather thought to have been shed by the Archangel Gabriel.
Hey, I suppose it's possible. If it's not true, it's still worth keeping, if only to irritate agnostics.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
