Lakewood Cemetery Memorial Chapel

When six mosaic artisans finished a commission at the Vatican in 1909, they didn’t retire. Designer Charles Lamb recruited them to spend the next three years fabricating, then installing, 10 million tesserae inside a cemetery chapel in Minneapolis: a Byzantine masterpiece that experts say couldn’t be replicated today. The skills required have largely vanished, making this 1910 chapel one of the finest examples of Byzantine mosaic art in America, and possibly one of the last of its kind.

The chapel itself, designed by architect Harry Wild Jones, borrows its silhouette from the Hagia Sophia: a granite exterior in Byzantine Revival style, crowned by a dome ringed with 24 stained-glass windows that function as a sundial. Inside, the artisans’ tesserae, cut from marble, colored stone, and glass fused with gold and silver, cover the walls and ceiling in mosaics of angels, virtues, and geometric patterning, all shipped from Venice in pieces small enough to fit in the hand. Lakewood Cemetery, established in 1871, had been open less than four decades when the chapel was finished. Its permanence has outlasted the trade that built it.