CHAPTER 55
Legend proclaims that it is physically impossible, upon entering the Baptistry of San Giovanni, not to look up. Langdon, despite having been in this room many times, now felt the mystical pull of the space, and let his gaze climb skyward to the ceiling.
High, high overhead, the surface of the baptistry’s octagonal vault spanned more than eighty feet from side to side. It glistened and shimmered as if it were made of smoldering coals. Its burnished amber-gold surface reflected the ambient light unevenly from more than a million smalti tiles—tiny ungrouted mosaic pieces hand-cut from a glassy silica glaze—which were arranged in six concentric rings in which scenes from the Bible were depicted.
Adding stark drama to the lustrous upper portion of the room, natural light pierced the dark space through a central oculus—much like the one in Rome’s Pantheon—assisted by a series of high, small, deeply recessed windows that threw shafts of illumination that were so focused and tight that they seemed almost solid, like structural beams propped at ever-changing angles.
As Langdon walked with Sienna deeper into the room, he took in the legendary ceiling mosaic—a multitiered representation of heaven and hell, very much like the depiction in The Divine Comedy.
Dante Alighieri saw this as a child, Langdon thought. Inspiration from above.
Langdon fixed his gaze now on the centerpiece of the mosaic. Hovering directly above the main altar rose a twenty-seven-foot-tall Jesus Christ, seated in judgment over the saved and the damned.
At Jesus’ right hand, the righteous received the reward of everlasting life.
On His left hand, however, the sinful were stoned, roasted on spikes, and eaten by all manner of creatures.
Overseeing the torture was a colossal mosaic of Satan portrayed as an infernal, man-eating beast. Langdon always flinched when he saw this figure, which more than seven hundred years ago had stared down at the young Dante Alighieri, terrifying him and eventually inspiring his vivid portrayal of what lurked in the final ring of hell.
The frightening mosaic overhead depicted a horned devil that was in the process of consuming a human being headfirst. The victim’s legs dangled from Satan’s mouth in a way that resembled the flailing legs of the half-buried sinners in Dante’s Malebolge.
Lo ’mperador del doloroso regno, Langdon thought, recalling Dante’s text. The emperor of the despondent kingdom.
Slithering from the ears of Satan were two massive, writhing snakes, also in the process of consuming sinners, giving the impression that Satan had three heads, exactly as Dante described him in the final canto of his Inferno. Langdon searched his memory and recalled fragments of Dante’s imagery.
On his head he had three faces … his three chins gushing a bloody froth … his three mouths used as grinders … gnashing sinners three at once.
That Satan’s evil was threefold, Langdon knew, was fraught with symbolic meaning: it placed him in perfect balance with the threefold glory of the Holy Trinity.
As Langdon stared up at the horrific sight, he tried to imagine the effect the mosaic had on the youthful Dante, who had attended services at this church year after year, and seen Satan staring down at him each time he prayed. This morning, however, Langdon had the uneasy feeling that the devil was staring directly at him.
He quickly lowered his gaze to the baptistry’s second-story balcony and standing gallery—the lone area from which women were permitted to view baptisms—and then down to the suspended tomb of Antipope John XXIII, his body lying in repose high on the wall like a cave dweller or a subject in a magician’s levitation trick.
Finally, his gaze reached the ornately tiled floor, which many believed contained references to medieval astronomy. He let his eyes move across the intricate black-and-white patterns until they reached the very center of the room.
And there it is, he thought, knowing he was staring at the exact spot where Dante Alighieri had been baptized in the latter half of the thirteenth century. “ ‘I shall return as poet … at my baptismal font,’ ” Langdon declared, his voice echoing through the empty space. “This is it.”
Sienna looked troubled as she eyed the center of the floor, where Langdon was now pointing. “But … there’s nothing here.”
“Not anymore,” Langdon replied.
All that remained was a large reddish-brown octagon of pavement. This unusually plain, eight-sided area clearly interrupted the pattern of the more ornately designed floor and resembled nothing so much as a large, patched-up hole, which, in fact, was precisely what it was.
Langdon quickly explained that the baptistry’s original baptismal font had been a large octagonal pool located at the very center of this room. While modern fonts were usually raised basins, earlier fonts were more akin to the literal meaning of the word font—“springs” or “fountains”—in this case a deep pool of water into which participants could be more deeply immersed. Langdon wondered what this stone chamber had sounded like as children screamed in fear while being literally submerged in the large pool of icy water that once stood in the middle of the floor.
“Baptisms here were cold and scary,” Langdon said. “True rites of passage. Dangerous even. Allegedly Dante once jumped into the font to save a drowning child. In any case, the original font was covered over at some point in the sixteenth century.”
Sienna’s eyes now began darting around the building with obvious concern. “But if Dante’s baptismal font is gone … where did Ignazio hide the mask?!”
Langdon understood her alarm. There was no shortage of hiding places in this massive chamber—behind columns, statues, tombs, inside niches, at the altar, even upstairs.
Nonetheless, Langdon felt remarkably confident as he turned and faced the door through which they’d just entered. “We should start over there,” he said, pointing to an area against the wall just to the right of the Gates of Paradise.
On a raised platform, behind a decorative gate, there sat a tall hexagonal plinth of carved marble, which resembled a small altar or service table. The exterior was so intricately carved that it resembled a mother-of-pearl cameo. Atop the marble base sat a polished wooden top with a diameter of about three feet.
Sienna looked uncertain as she followed Langdon over to it. As they ascended the steps and moved inside the protective gate, Sienna looked more closely and drew a startled breath, realizing what she was looking at.
Langdon smiled. Exactly, it’s not an altar or table. The polished wooden top was in fact a lid—a covering for the hollow structure.
“A baptismal font?” she asked.
Langdon nodded. “If Dante were baptized today, it would be in this basin right here.” Wasting no time, he took a deep, purposeful breath and placed his palms on the wooden cover, feeling a tingle of anticipation as he prepared to remove it.
Langdon tightly gripped the edges of the cover and heaved it to one side, carefully sliding the top off the marble base and placing it on the floor beside the font. Then he peered down into the two-foot-wide, dark, hollow space within.
The eerie sight made Langdon swallow hard.
From out of the shadows, the dead face of Dante Alighieri was looking back at him.