Also by Charles Freeman
A. D. 381
THE CLOSING OF THE WESTERN MIND
EGYPT, GREECE AND ROME
Frontispiece: The four horses of St Mark’s in their present setting inside the basilica (Ancient Art).
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York & London
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2004 by Charles Freeman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-302-5
For Issie
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have to thank my agent Bill Hamilton for encouraging me to concentrate on the story of the horses rather than on the more general theme of Venice, which I had at first proposed. His faith that they would have a remarkable history was well placed. At Time Warner, my editor Richard Beswick was instrumental in advising on the shape of the book as it matured. Once the book was written, Gillian Somerscales corrected my clumsier sentences and spelling discrepancies with care and tact, while Linda Silverman tracked down not only those pictures I had requested but many more of interest that we were able to use. Viv Redman oversaw the production process with gentle yet firm efficiency and I am grateful to Sue Phillpott for proofreading and Dave Atkinson for compiling the index.
CONTENTS
Also by Charles Freeman
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 PLUNDERED PLUNDER
2 CONSTANTINOPLE: THE HORSES’ FIRST HOME?
3 HORSES AND HEROES
4 CREATING QUADRIGAE
5 WATCHERS IN THE HIPPODROME
6 THE FOURTH CRUSADE AND THE SACK OF CONSTANTINOPLE
7 THE HORSES ARRIVE AT ST MARK’S
8 DOGE OR EMPEROR? THE HORSES, HIPPODROMES AND IMPERIAL DISPLAY
9 VENICE: THE REPUBLICAN COMMUNITY
10 THE SEARCH FOR THE HORSES’ ORIGINS
11 THE IDEAL HORSE?
12 THE HORSES IN AN AGE OF DECADIMENTO
13 THE FALL OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC
14 ‘TO THE CARROUSEL!’: THE HORSES TRIUMPH IN PARIS
15 ANTONIO CANOVA AND THE RETURN OF THE HORSES TO VENICE
16 GREEK OR ROMAN? THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DEBATES
17 FRAGMENTED IMAGINATIONS: THE REINVENTION OF VENICE
18 DENOUEMENTS
19 ENVOI: THE HORSES AS CULTURAL ICONS
Bibliographical Note
Index
PREFACE
I FIRST VISITED VENICE IN 1970, AS A STUDENT, AND I CAN still remember the touch of condescension in the voice of the manager of a small Venetian hotel as he directed me towards the smallest and cheapest of the boxes he offered his guests. Yet despite this qualified welcome, Venice cast its spell. It is above all a city to explore on foot – by far the best way to understand any city if the traffic will allow one, but especially appropriate for Venice with its numerous passageways, unexpected squares, lapping water, and feast of decorated doors and windows. Here was my first chance to catch some of the moods of this most ambiguous of places.
Since then the city has been woven in and out of my life. I have taken A-level art historians there as part of the final week of an Italian summer school (by then, in the heat of August, the Lido won out over art) and over the years have introduced my growing family to the city. It is an especial pleasure to dedicate this book to my daughter Issie, who first came to Venice when she was very small indeed but now can visit it on her own. May the city survive for her to introduce it to yet another generation of the family!
There are, of course, too many books on Venice. Perhaps no other city has so fragmented itself in the imagination. As the historians John Martin and Dennis Romano have recently written, ‘There are simply too many Venices, too many unknown dimensions. Just when one believes one is beginning the story line, Venice transmogrifies and, both in spite of and because of the richness of its archives and artistic treasures, is again a mystery, an enigma, an indecipherable maze of interweaving stories, false and true.’* My only excuse for adding another story, another book, lies in serendipity (it has, above all, been fun to write) and my own interest, primarily as an ancient historian, in how a particular set of artistic treasures from the classical world interacted with two thousand years of European history.
CHARLES FREEMAN,
November 2003
Moreover above the entrance to the temple [St Mark’s] there is a wide terrace in the open, in the middle of which can be seen from below four bronze and gilded horses set on little columns making a great show of themselves with such a motion and stride that all of them seem to be wanting to jump down into the square together. A rare and exceedingly ancient work – they were all made for the chariot of the sun – the skill of their construction is amazing. They are all similar to each other, so that you can find nothing in one unlike the others, yet such is their stance with neck and feet that although they strain forward in step together, their stride and movement are wholly dissimilar … It is said that they were brought from Constantinople as were almost all the precious marbles on the temple.
BERNARDO GIUSTINIANI, De origine urbis
Venetiarum, 1493
1
PLUNDERED PLUNDER
TOWARDS THE END OF JULY 1798 AN EXTRAORDINARY procession wound its way through the streets of Paris towards the Champ de Mars, the military parade ground which had been adopted by the Parisians of revolutionary France as the site of major festivals. Much of it consisted of large packing cases whose contents could only be guessed at from slogans on the side which proclaimed them to be art treasures. On open display there were animals – among them caged lions, a bear and even a pair of dromedaries – paraded alongside tropical plants, including palm, banana and coconut trees; but the only art works actually visible to the curious onlookers were four horses of gilded metal, larger than life-size, arrayed on a wagon which was itself drawn by six horses. They were known to have come from Venice, where they had been seized by Napoleon when the city had surrendered to him.
Those familiar with ancient history might have guessed that this was an attempted re-enactment of a Roman triumphal procession, and they would have been right. What they saw arriving in Paris were the victory spoils of one of France’s most successful military commanders: Napoleon Bonaparte, who – still only twenty-eight – had recently conquered much of Italy. Napoleon had followed the great Roman conquerors of the past in stripping his enemies of many of their finest works of art and taking them back to his own capital. The city which had suffered most from his looting was, ironically, Rome itself, where the pope, Pius VI, had given up some of the most prestigious of his possessions: world-renowned classical statues, among them the Capitoline Venus, the Laocoön, and the Belvedere Apollo. With this in mind, the assembled Parisian crowds had been given a song to sing:
The horses make their triumphal entry into Paris in July 1798. The columned building at the far end of the Champ de Mars is the Temple of the Fatherland where the horses and other trophies were received by the academicians. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Rome n’est plus dans Rome
Elle est tout à Paris
– ‘Rome is no longer in Rome, it is all in Paris.’ And indeed, as well as the statues, which themselves made Paris the most richly endowed city in original classical art in Europe, the conqueror had brought home a comparable haul of Renaissance treasures. Among the trophies crammed into those packing cases was a startling number of sixteenth-century paintings by masters such as Raphael, Correggio, Titian and Tintoretto.
When news of Napoleon’s plunder had first reached Paris, many had wondered whether the French government, the Directory – bourgeois and unimaginative when compared with the fervour of the earlier revolutionary regimes – would accept the treasures into this ‘new Rome’ with a celebration worthy of the occasion. No one had seemed prepared to put up the money to mount a proper display, and the commissioners who had selected the works in Italy began to worry. ‘Will we let the precious booty from Rome arrive in Paris like charcoal barges and will we have it disembarked on the Quai du Louvre like crates of soap?’ said one. Then a government official had the inspired idea of asking Napoleon himself to finance the transport and display of the hoard. Napoleon had been assiduous in proclaiming the extent of his gains in letters to the Directory, and it was clear that he saw them as valuable propaganda for himself as much as works of art won for the nation. He would not be able to lead the celebrations himself – he was about to embark on his expedition to Egypt – but a triumphal procession modelled on those of republican Rome could be staged in his absence. So, once the ministry of foreign affairs had announced Napoleon’s agreement to the proposal, a formal approach was made by the minister of the interior to the Directory on behalf of the commissioners and, it was claimed, ‘poets, philosophers, and public officials’, that ‘all those who feel the need of restoring public spirit and to increase national pride by having the spoils of conquered peoples pass before the eyes of our people, all join in requesting that the day that these fruits of our victories enter into Paris be celebrated by a festival’.
The date of the festival, however, was continually postponed as the logistics of transporting so many heavy crates were sorted out. The horses and other treasures had come by sea from Venice, while those from Rome had been loaded on to ships at Leghorn(Livorno); all were disembarked at Marseilles, from where they came by barge up the French canal network. Their reception in Paris was eventually fixed for 27 and 28 July, when it would coincide with the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of an earlier casualty of the revolution, the ‘tyrant’ Maximilien Robespierre.
That the revolutionary leaders should look to classical Rome for inspiration was understandable. Many of them had received a traditional classical education, and even before 1789 republican Rome – Rome in the period from the overthrow of the king Tarquinius Superbus in 509 BC to the assumption of power by Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, in 27 BC – had been upheld as a model of civic virtue in which citizens dedicated their energies to their country in both peace and war. The procession of 1798 was modelled on one held in Rome in 167 BC by the conqueror of Macedonia, Aemilius Paulus. His exploits and the victory procession itself had been described in the Lives of Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and biographer of the first and second centuries AD who was widely read in the eighteenth century. According to Plutarch, the triumph had lasted over three days, the first of which had been taken up with a parade of 250 wagons full of works of art. The second day had been devoted to the piles of armour stripped from the enemy, the third to gold plate and coins – and to the display of Perseus, the defeated Macedonian leader, and his family. In the Paris ‘triumph’ there were again three sections, but this time the divisions reflected not the generic types of booty but the preoccupation of Enlightenment thinkers with the classification of knowledge: Napoleon’s prizes were categorized as ‘natural history’, ‘books and manuscripts’ and ‘fine arts’. Each section was provided with an escort of foot troops and cavalry, and a military band to lead the exhibits. The natural history section included the banana, palm and coconut trees, which came from Trinidad; the lions and dromedaries, from Africa; and the bear, which had had a less exotic home – a zoo in Bern. An early draft of the plans required that the antiquities be dedicated at the Altar of the Fatherland on the Champ de Mars, in the same way that Roman victors such as Aemilius had offered theirs to the Temple of Jupiter, the Father of the Gods, on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. In the event the suggestion was replaced by a more sober one in which political leaders and members of the august Académie Française, the arbiter of French language and culture, would welcome the antiquities on behalf of the French government and its learned institutions. Only one of the objects – the most sacred of all, a bust of Junius Brutus, the Brutus who had assassinated the ‘dictator’ Julius Caesar, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome – was to be placed on a pedestal in front of the altar, where it would evoke France’s own overthrow of monarchy. The rest were destined for display in the city or in the new museum planned in the former royal palace of the Louvre.
What confirmed the procession as triumphal were the four horses. It was always in a chariot drawn by four horses, a quadriga, that a successful Roman commander paraded himself with his booty through the streets of Rome.* Now, even in Napoleon’s absence, the four horses from Venice could be seen as a symbol of his military victories. They also carried with them a political message, proclaimed in the slogan on an accompanying banner: ‘Horses transported from Corinth to Rome and from Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice and from Venice to France. They are finally in a free land.’ This storyline echoed the traditional accounts that they were made of Corinthian bronze, had stood on a triumphal arch in Rome and then by the hippodrome in Constantinople before being carried off from there as plunder by the Venetians after the Fourth Crusade of 1204. When Napoleon had seized them in Venice they were gracing the loggia above the great central door of the basilica of St Mark’s. French intellectuals of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu among them, had long derided eighteenth-century Venice as a decadent tyranny, and Napoleon, as a servant of the revolution, could adapt their critique to offer liberation as a specious justification for his seizure of the horses and other Venetian treasures.
Napoleon’s argument that art treasures needed liberating was hardly convincing, however, and did not find favour even in France. For educated Frenchmen, the governments of the Italian states may have been corrupt, but Italy remained Europe’s cultural centre. In a pamphlet written in 1796 the distinguished French antiquarian Quatremère de Quincy had condemned the idea that property should belong to those most able to grasp it, especially if it meant dismembering the cities of Italy. Works of art could not simply be uprooted from the context in which they stood. The ‘museum which is Rome’ was much more than its art treasures; ‘it is also composed fully as much of places, of sites, of mountains, of quarries, of ancient roads, of the placing of ruined towers, of geographical relationships, of the inner connections of all these objects to each other, of memories, of local traditions, of still prevailing customs, of parallels and comparisons which can only be made in the country itself.’ (It was de Quincy who remarked of Napoleon that he was ‘devoured by anticipatory lust after the best things in each country, whether masterpieces and precious objects or men of talent and renown’.) He was backed by a petition bearing the signatures of forty-seven prominent artists, among them the most famous artist of the revolution, Jacques Louis David, who also deplored the sacking of Italy. The petition was suppressed and a more supportive one signed by a group of lesser artists was placed in the official government newspaper, the Gazette Nationale, in which the modern Romans were denounced as lazy and superstitious barbarians who did not deserve their treasures.
Less crude rationales for seizing so much fine art were soon being formulated. A theory put forward earlier in the century by the German art historian Johann Winckelmann, that great art and liberty went hand in hand, was exploited to suggest that as the French were now living in liberty all great art should be drawn i
nto France.* Others argued that the major works of antiquity were the birthright of whichever nation had attained glory through force of arms. ‘The Romans plundered the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Egyptians, accumulated the booty in Rome and other Italian cities; the fate of these products of genius is to belong to the people who shine successively on earth by arms and by wisdom, and to follow always the wagons of the victors,’ as one official speech put it. The impact of art as a transmitter of civilization was not forgotten.
The Romans, once an uncultivated people, became civilised by transplanting to Rome the works of conquered Greece … Thus the French people, naturally endowed with exquisite sensitivity, will, by seeing the models from antiquity, train its feeling and its critical sense … The French Republic, by its strength and superiority of its enlightenment and its artists is the only country in the world which can give a safe home to these masterpieces.
Napoleon himself had made an even more astonishing assertion as he began gathering the first of the antiquities in 1796: ‘All men of genius, all those who have attained distinction in the republic of letters, are French, no matter in what country they may have been born’ – so it was appropriate that Paris should be the new centre of European culture. A more pragmatic excuse was that the works were falling into decay in the hands of the ignorant Italians and that, in the words of one of the commissioners who had selected them, ‘it is most fortunate for the cause of Art that it only requires the practised hand of our craftsmen to restore these masterpieces to the true lovers of the arts.’ There was a grain of truth in this: French conservationists had evolved methods of dealing with painted surfaces which were the most advanced in the world.
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