The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Another group of seized statues was linked specifically to Constantinople’s imperial past. A large bronze of a ruler – one of the early Christian emperors, possibly Marcian (emperor 450–7) – never reached Venice: the ship carrying it from the east was shipwrecked off southern Italy and the statue still remains where it was rescued, at Barletta. Then there are the four soldiers in porphyry which are now embedded in the southern wall of St Mark’s, on the outside of the Treasury. There are two pairs; each soldier has one hand on his sword while the other clasps his fellow on the shoulder. Byzantine sources suggest that they came from a building known as the Philadelphion, and excavations in Istanbul again confirmed the provenance when a piece of porphyry which proved a perfect match was found close to where this building had stood. The soldiers are now considered to be Diocletian and his fellow tetrarchs, joint rulers of the empire in the late third century, although it appears that when they were in Constantinople they were believed to be the four sons of Constantine. Either way they are linked to Constantine’s family for his father, Constantius, was one of the tetrarchs. On the same wall of St Mark’s, up on the railing at the south-western corner of the loggia, is another of the spoils of 1204: a porphyry head of an emperor, believed by many to be Justinian. Marbles and jewels were also taken from the Church of the Holy Apostles, the burial place of Constantine and many of his successors, although none of these can be identified in Venice today.

  The accounts of the sack tell us that Dandolo himself picked out the four horses which were to come to rest at St Mark’s. There is one possible reason, apart from their obvious quality, why Dandolo may have been drawn to the horses. In the fifth century BC the Veneto was considered one of the best areas in which to find chariot horses; it is possible that memories of this trade were still alive and were known to Dandolo, perhaps having been passed on to him on one of his visits to Constantinople.* If this was what attracted him to horses, which horses might he have chosen? Many commentators have assumed without much discussion that he chose the team which had been set up on the starting gates of the hippodrome by Theodosius II. We know that these were still in place in 1162, when Niketas Choniates wrote of ‘four gilt-bronze horses, their necks somewhat curved as if they eyed each other as they raced round the last lap’, and at first sight they do seem the most likely choice. There are four horses, apparently without a chariot, and they are gilt. Unlike many of the more accessible bronzes in the hippodrome itself, they would have been difficult to reach, so the mob may have spared them and left them available for Dandolo to take.

  However, there are also grounds for doubt. The horses now in St Mark’s can hardly be described as ‘racing’ – they are clearly, with three feet on the ground, standing – and on these grounds as early as the eighteenth century a Göttingen professor, Christian Gottlieb Heyne, dismissed the claim that the starting-gate horses were the same as those on St Mark’s. It has also been claimed, by the Italian scholar Vittorio Galliazzi, that in their original setting the horses were in two pairs with the heads of each looking outwards, and that it was only when they were placed on St Mark’s that the heads of the two outer horses were detached (they are separate castings, so this would not have been difficult) and transposed to make two pairs, each with their heads looking inwards towards each other. As we shall see in the next chapter, the art historian Michael Jacoff provides a reason why the heads needed to be changed over when the horses were set up on St Mark’s. If Galliazzi and Jacoff are right, then these horses would not have been ‘eyeing each other’ in their original setting and so could not have been those on the starting gates.

  One can take a different line and highlight Dandolo’s own obsession with the humiliation of Constantinople. If he merely wanted high-quality statues for their own sake, there would have been many, especially from the area of the hippodrome, that he could have saved from destruction. We may guess instead that he wanted to appropriate something which was symbolic of the core of the city’s identity. The most prestigious quadriga of the three recorded in the eighth century was surely that at the Milion which accompanied the statue of Zeus Helios (or Constantine in that guise). This set of four horses, with all its associations with the founding of the city and its founder himself, would have provided all the resonances of the victory that Dandolo could wish for. Yet we cannot fix on these horses with absolute certainty either, for they were described by the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai as being ‘driven headlong’, again hardly an accurate representation of the St Mark’s horses; and so one might equally choose the third of the sets of horses, that seen in the hippodrome itself in the eighth century. These were also associated with the foundation ceremonies of the city. However, the original Greek word used in the Parastaseis to describe them as a group is ‘yoked’, and there is no evidence from the St Mark’s horses of any fittings for yokes on their bodies.

  So the identification of the St Mark’s horses is not straightforward. And yet, how better to humiliate Constantinople and its empire than to take a treasure which represented not only its august founder but the moment of the city’s foundation itself, and to add it as the crowning piece of the plundered imperial statuary? My own guess would be that Dandolo chose the horses from the Milion. This would explain why the scholarly Bernardo Giustiniani wrote in 1493 of the horses as being ‘all made for the chariot of the sun’. If they had been detached from the chariot of Zeus Helios and brought to Venice, then the memory of their original setting may well have travelled with them.

  7

  THE HORSES ARRIVE AT ST MARK’S

  DESPITE THE ENORMITY OF THE SACK OF CONSTANTINOPLE, the Venetians seem to have been untroubled by guilt. In Martino da Canal’s Estoires de Venise, written between 1267 and 1275, the sack is presented as a justified conquest and Dandolo praised for it. ‘It was through the wisdom of this great man that a city as grand as Constantinople was taken; and this’, Canal adds somewhat unscrupulously, ‘he did in the service of the Holy Church.’ Great canvases by Jacopo Palma il Giovane, hung when the Doge’s Palace was redecorated in 1587 after a fire, show Dandolo before the walls of Constantinople, urging on the Venetians from his barge. By that time, of course, the Venetians knew what they were really celebrating: the acquisition of a trading empire which had brought them dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. Even though they were to lose their foothold in Constantinople itself in 1261, when the city was regained by Greek emperors, the thirteenth century was to be one of great prosperity for Venice.

  That prosperity was to be reflected in the transformation of St Mark’s. The eleventh-century basilica had been fronted in brick, but by the middle of the thirteenth century the western façade had been remodelled to provide an opulent backdrop to the Piazza, and the domes above it raised to the form visible today. The remodelling goes hand in hand with a rise in status of the procurators of St Mark’s, those responsible to the doge for the care and embellishment of the fabric of the basilica. By the 1260s they are housed in the Piazza itself and are increasingly responsible for the Piazza’s own buildings and other estates in the city. The office of chief procurator was so prestigious that it could even serve as a stepping stone to that of doge itself.

  The work on St Mark’s set in hand by the procurators was extensive. A narthex, fronted by five arches reminiscent of the triumphal arches of Rome, was built round the western façade and this was faced with reused marbles, mosaics and columns, many of them from among the loot brought from Constantinople. Unfortunately only one of the original mosaics, that over the Porta San Alipio on the far left, showing the arrival of the body of St Mark in front of the basilica itself, survives, and this is not from Constantinople but Venetian work dating from about 1267; the others are much later restorations or replacements. This façade was dedicated to religious themes – on either side of the central ‘triumphal’ arch a relief of a saint was added, St Demetrius on one side and St George on the other. Both are warrior saints, as if to proclaim spiritual support for Venice’s new status a
s a city of conquerors. Moving outwards from the centre, between the first and second doors there is a relief of the Angel Gabriel appearing to – in a similar position on the other side – the Virgin Mary orans, her arms uplifted in prayer, the standard Byzantine representation. They were no doubt placed on the façade as a reminder of the legend that Venice was founded on the day of the Annunciation. More perplexing are two reliefs of the pagan god Hercules, represented in his labours, attached at the far ends of the façade. They will reappear in the story.

  On the south side of the basilica the mood is somewhat different. The porphyry statues of the tetrarchs were placed on the corner wall of the basilica’s Treasury (close to what was originally one of the main entrances to the basilica) while the head of another Byzantine emperor, probably Justinian, was, as we have seen, set up on the end of the loggia, the platform which ran along the top of the narthex. Some of the finest marble reliefs and slabs from Constantinople were embedded in the wall of the Treasury. When visitors landed on the Molo this was the first they would see of the basilica, and the façade seems deliberately to have been designed as a showcase of imperial Venetian pride. It was here in the Piazzetta that extra monuments were placed as they arrived in the city. The two pillars from the Church of St Polyeuktos were put in their present place in front of the southern façade in 1258. This somewhat isolated position may seem strange, but the Old Testament description of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 7: 15) mentions two bronze pillars ‘in the vestibule of the sanctuary’. Both are described (v. 20) as having pomegranates on the moulding, and pomegranates are also carved on the St Polyeuktos pillars. It is possible that the Venetians, who had trading links with Jerusalem, were attempting to recreate Solomon’s Temple, with all its ancient spiritual resonances; indeed, the suggestion is reinforced when we find that there is a relief of the Judgement of Solomon nearby on the wall of the Doge’s Palace.

  The stump of a porphyry column, the so-called Colonna del Bando, captured from the Genoese in the city of Acre in 1257, was set up at the corner of the basilica in 1265. It served as a base from which to display the severed heads of criminals, ‘though the smell of them doth breede a very offensive and contagious annoyance’, remarked the Englishman Thomas Coryat when he visited Venice in 1608. The Colonna had its day of glory, however: on 14 July 1902, when the Campanile collapsed and the Colonna helped prevent the rush of brick and stone reaching St Mark’s. Meanwhile the Treasury of St Mark’s was crammed with an assortment of loot from Constantinople, including the most sacred relics possible, those directly associated with the passion of Christ. Alongside them were placed the Egyptian vases and Greek vessels showing Dionysiac revels, which the Venetians had carried off with the relics. Sacred and profane still exist happily together in the Treasury today.

  Some time in the middle of the thirteenth century the four horses selected by Enrico Dandolo were hauled up on to the loggia above the central door of the basilica. They had been brought back to Venice, on Dandolo’s orders, in the personal care of one Domenico Morosini. The story goes that during the voyage a foot was knocked off one of the horses and the Morosini family was allowed to keep it. It passed down the family and was mounted on a bracket on the façade of one or another of their various palaces as a symbol of the family’s distinguished history and connection with the sack of Constantinople. When the horses arrived in Venice they were placed at first in the Arsenale, the naval dockyard. It seems no one knew what to do with them: with Dandolo’s death in Constantinople, the reasons why he had selected the horses and any plans he might have had for them must have been lost. There is even a story that they came close to being melted down but that some visiting Florentines, more sophisticated than the Venetians in such things, were horrified at what was about to be destroyed and urged that they be saved.

  This nineteenth-century terracotta is believed to be the copy of a much earlier silver plate commemorating the presentation of the horses to a personification of Venice by Enrico Dandolo. (Comune di Treviso, Ereditá Lattes/NV. n. 945)

  The mosaic from the Porta San Alipio on the façade of St Mark's dates from c.1267 and is the earliest representation of the horses in place on the loggia. The scene is anachronistic: it shows the arrival of the body of St Mark at the basilica in the ninth century. (S. Marco, Venezia/Scala)

  A range of dates between the 1220s and the 1260s has been suggested for the moment when the horses were actually raised up on to the loggia, but they were certainly in place by 1267, when they were depicted in the mosaic over the Porta San Alipio. There the horses are in the same position over the central door as they are today, divided into two pairs, each horse looking towards its immediate neighbour, with an open space left between them. (However, the mosaicist has transferred the raised leg of the inner horses from the outside to the inside, presumably to create a more symmetrical pattern.)

  One’s first response to the horses’ elevated position overlooking the Piazza is that they are being shown off as plunder, and this is reinforced by the ‘triumphal’ entrance arch above which they stand. While it is hard to believe that this was not one of the impulses behind their display, the west front of St Mark’s was, as we have seen, a ‘religious’ rather than ‘political’ façade, and it may be that the horses also represented some kind of religious statement. The problem lies in identifying what it might have been. In the Old Testament there are certainly chariots but it is not always clear by what they are drawn. In the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, for instance, there is a chariot drawn by four animals, but these are strange composite creatures, of human form but with the hooves of oxen and four wings. Then there is the fiery chariot which takes Elijah up to heaven (2 Kings 2). The Hebrew word used to describe it is not associated with any specific number of horses, and when the Hebrew was translated into Greek in the third century BC the Greek word used was harma, a general term for chariot, again with no association with a specific number of horses. Yet when the fourth-century scholar Jerome went back to the Hebrew as the basis for his Latin version of the Old Testament (known as the Vulgate, this remained the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘official’ version for centuries), he decided to emphasize Elijah’s status by translating ‘chariot’ as quadriga. For Jerome, nothing less was suitable for the prophet. Whether Jerome knew it or not, the same approach had been taken in art: at least two early Christian sarcophagi have reliefs which show Elijah being taken up to heaven in a classical quadriga with its four horses.

  Centuries after Jerome, in the twelfth century in fact, just a few years before the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians, we find quadrigae, this time actual chariots drawn by four horses, used in Constantinople in recreations of that most ancient ceremonial ritual of the Roman world, the triumph. Niketas Choniates, in his history of the events of this century, tells how the Byzantine emperor John inflicted a massive defeat on the Turks and then, in 1133, mounted a triumphal procession, but this time one set in a Christian context, in Constantinople. A silver-plated chariot was constructed and decorated with semi-precious jewels.

  The splendid quadriga was pulled by four horses whiter than snow, with magnificent manes. The emperor himself did not mount the chariot [as would have happened, of course, in ancient Rome] but instead mounted upon it the icon of the Mother of God … To her as the unconquerable fellow general, he attributed his victories and ordering his chief ministers to take hold of the reins and his closest relations to attend to the chariot, he led the way on foot with the cross held in his hand.

  This was not an isolated incident. When the emperor Manuel won his great victory over the Hungarians in 1167, he too decided to hold a Roman-style triumph complete with captives and plunder. The population of Constantinople was assembled to watch from specially constructed platforms as the procession wound its way through the streets. ‘When the time came for the emperor to join the triumphal procession, he was preceded by a gilded silver chariot drawn by four horses as white as snowflakes, and ensconced on it was the icon of th
e Mother of God, the invincible ally and unconquerable fellow general of the emperor.’ The procession eventually reached Santa Sophia, where a service of thanksgiving was held before the emperor retired to his palace and then, ‘unstringing himself like a bow from the excessive tension, he relaxed at the horse races’.

  Reliefs of the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven in a quadriga are known from as early as the fourth century AD. This portrayal, from the cathedral in Anagni, central Italy, is shown in a fresco dating from the thirteenth century and thus roughly contemporary with the placing of the horses on St Mark’s. It reveals how quadrigae could be incorporated into Christian art. (The Art Archive)

  So the quadriga could be transferred into Christian contexts; and the art historian Michael Jacoff has suggested yet another which seems to be of particular relevance to the horses of St Mark’s. He has found references which compare the four evangelists with four horses which pull ‘the quadriga of the Lord’. As Jerome wrote in a letter of 394, ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the Lord’s team of four, the true cherubim or store of knowledge.’ In the ninth century another source (Haimo of Auxerre) proclaims that ‘the preaching of the Gospel rests upon the authority of the four Evangelists and the four Gospels are like the four of the quadriga of the New Testament, which Christ himself as charioteer controls, himself guiding and drawing up the chariot of the Gospels’. There even exists a link to Venice in an eleventh-century sermon by St Peter Damian, on the theme of Mark, and possibly even preached in St Mark’s, which describes the chariot of Aminadab, from the Old Testament Song of Songs, as ‘a forerunner of the quadriga of the gospel of Christ’, again with Christ as the charioteer. While there is no surviving direct reference to the St Mark’s horses themselves as the ‘quadriga of the Lord’, the image was certainly current in Venice.