Many believe their Tiffany?s items to be sacred. But St. Mark?s Tiffany pieces really are.
Louis Comfort Tiffany?s company designed nearly the entire interior of St. Mark?s Lutheran Church in Baltimore, including mosaics gleaming with uncut opals and breathtaking stained glass windows. Tiffany is the son of iconic jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany, who established the impeccable Tiffany name.
Louis Tiffany?s Resurrection and Good Shepard windows, inside St. Mark?s, contrast the common church window style of his time. Predescessors to Tiffany focused on figurative compositions uniformly colored with consistent thickness, said Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of an exhibit on Tiffany at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Rich, pulsating golds, blues, greens and reds capture visitors when they take in St. Mark’s works of wonder.
A treasure trove inside the church includes its semi-dome, lunette window, Rubio marble altar inlaid with gold and mother of pearl, rose window surrounded by 12 lights symbolizing the 12 apostles and four pillars symbolic of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
“[Louis Tiffany] really stretched the medium of stained glass, and what is possible,” Frelinghuysen said. “He invented the ways to achieve theillusion of depth and modeling, and developed very colorful, layered panels.”
St. Mark’s was built over one hundred years ago in Baltimore’s historic Midtown section, designed by Joseph Evans Sperry in a Romanesque style. Sperry also designed the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer tower.
Builders constructed the church to house 1,000 people. However, only 150 worshippers gather weekly in the awe-inspiring place, said Reverend Dale Dusman, pastor at St. Mark?s.
“Our congregation, at one time was the largest Lutheran congregation in Maryland I believe,” said James Harp, St. Mark’s cantor for 20 years.
The first congregants in 1898 were most likely descendents of upscale German immigrants. “Language then was a big deal,” Rev. Dusman said. St. Mark?s first members spoke English. To emphasize the congregation’s language, the church was originally named St. Mark’s English Lutheran Church, he said.
St. Mark’s majestic features “certainly affect how we approach the building,” Rev. Dusman said.
“God is present wherever anyone praises, but to be surrounded [by the church’s beauty] is extraordinary,” Harp said. “In scripture, I believe, it says ‘Worship god in the beauty of holiness,’ and the church allows us to do that. It heightens ones spiritual experience.”
