A few days ago Mike and I went on a Grail hunt. The quest was a big success: we rounded up about two dozen Grails in less than an hour.
It helps if you know where to look. We were looking in the Carnegie, the vast museum complex in Pittsburgh, which made the hunt a bit easier. You don’t have to look far in any big art museum to find images of the Last Supper or the Eucharist.
One of my favorite places on earth is the Hall of Architecture at the Carnegie, a single gigantic room that houses North America’s greatest collection of plaster casts. These are life-size duplicates of the original monuments, made a hundred years ago so that Pittsburghers could study the whole history of Western architecture without crossing the sea, or for that matter the Monongahela River.
Neither words nor pictures can describe the awe this place inspires. You can follow Western architecture from ancient Egypt right through to the Renaissance, all at life size. The casts perfectly duplicate every pockmark and grain of the originals. In fact, they do better than that.
In the hundred years since the casts were made, most of the originals have suffered heart-wrenching damage from air pollution, two world wars, vandalism, and tourism. But the Carnegie’s casts have been safe in the great space that was built for them. They’re not just duplicates of the originals anymore: in many cases, they’re more original than the originals.
The centerpiece of the collection is the entire west front of the Romanesque abbey church of St Gilles in France. (You can see photos of the original church on line.) The church was built in the 1100s, which - as you’ll read in The Grail Code - was right around the time when Chretien de Troyes was writing the first of the great Grail romances. A great wave of Eucharistic piety was sweeping Europe
Three giant doorways, crowded with sculptures (many defaced hundreds of years ago by Calvinist fanatics), lead into the church. Over the doors is a frieze that narrates the events of Holy Week, from the entry into Jerusalem to the Crucifixion.
Right in the center, over the main portal, is the Last Supper.
The position could hardly be more symbolically appropriate, as any Harvard symbologist could tell you. In unmistakable visual language, the institution of the Eucharist is placed as the central event of Christ’s earthly ministry. It’s also literally the center of the church, as you see it from the front. And by walking in through the main door, you, the Christian worshiper, would enter the Last Supper. You would become a guest at Christ’s table.
By placing this medieval masterpiece of symbolism as the focal point of the Hall of Architecture, the Carnegie has - probably unwittingly - placed the Eucharist at the very center of Western architecture itself. That sounds about right to me.
