The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Several forces combined to make Venice such a harmonious community. Its very survival as a city depended on cooperative activity. There had to be continuous activity of draining land, shoring up what was exposed above water, driving in piles to support the buildings. In the thirteenth century the new prosperity brought about by the success of the crusade saw an explosion of building (of which the transformation of San Marco was part) and we find the government taking increasing responsibility for overall control. New agencies oversaw the public thoroughfares, streets were paved, bridges were built, first in wood, then in stone. Islands were created from reclaimed land, laws passed preventing the pollution of canals, especially by the dyers and the butchers who had been throwing in their discarded carcasses. It came to be acknowledged that citizens must accept control of their activities if the community as a whole was to live in good health and order. A supply of clean water was vital and the officials of one agency, the Piovego, sponsored new wells, fifty in the 1320s alone. As the only buildings that could stand on the shifting mud base were those with timber frames, Venice was particularly vulnerable to fire. So in 1291 the glassmakers, with their hazardous furnaces, were moved off to the island of Murano, where they can still be found at work today. (This did not, however, prevent the devastation of the Rialto area by fire in 1514.)

  The sense of cooperation in a shared enterprise could also be seen in the trading activities which were fundamental to the city’s prosperity and survival. Over long years of commercial activity Venetian traders acquired an intimate knowledge of the Mediterranean and its ports, and of the inland trading routes. The government saw its primary purpose as the preservation of Venetian supremacy – a priority we saw exercised with ruthless efficiency in the carving up of the Byzantine empire in 1204. Dandolo and his advisers knew exactly what outposts to take to secure the trade routes. Domination was particularly effective in the Adriatic, where Venice enforced its own maritime law. Foreign traders were forbidden to deal independently and were forced to come into the city to buy and sell their goods. (For example, traders from Germany were required to carry out their business in the Fondacio dei Tedeschi, a building near the Rialto.) Lucrative commodities, such as spices and silk, were carried in well-armed government ships. The Venetian ducat became one of the Mediterranean’s major currencies. In their day-to-day activities private merchants drew on shared resources, with risks being spread among groups of investors, known as colleganza.

  In short, Venice’s unique needs as a community precariously balanced on expanses of mud and dependent on fragile lines of trade imbued its citizens with an especial appreciation of the value of cooperation and an acquiescence in government interference and support. Individualism was not encouraged. The nobility could certainly construct their fine palaces but, as one writer of the 1580s noted, after describing the haughty aristocrats of the mainland Italian cities, ‘the noble Venetians are completely contrary in mood to these; because they go alone [in this case without ‘a flock of pages’] with simple clothing; however finely dressed, they keep a single gondola in the cavan that is their stall, and they exercise trade, which was not esteemed by the ancient Roman senators.’ Some two hundred and fifty years later, the French writer George Sand attributed the egalitarianism she noted to the nature of the city. ‘The lack of carriages and scarceness of land have made for the homogeneous population, who, through jostling one another on the sidewalk or crowding one another in the canals, show concern for the safety of each. All the walking and boating makes for heads on one level, where all eyes meet, where all mouths converse …’ There were mutterings if any noble family tried to build too ostentatious a family seat. (In fact the Venetian aristocracy modestly used the word ca, short for casa, ‘house’, to describe their palaces.) The survival of the Piazza San Marco and its neighbouring Piazzetta as open spaces depended on the restraint of powerful aristocrats who would otherwise have vied for control of the spaces or at least the buildings around them. In Venice, these remained under the supervision of the procurators.

  A late sixteenth-century view of St Mark’s Square with the Rialto Bridge beyond. In the foreground, right, is Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio. The western end of the square was demolished by Napoleon to make way for a palace containing a ballroom. (The Art Archive)

  The government as a whole remained relatively broadly based. The Serrata, the law of 1297, turned out to be a turning point in the city’s political history. Later historians saw the law with its limiting of government to descendants of the existing nobility, perhaps 4–5 per cent of the population, as the moment when Venice lost its liberty. However, one has only to compare Venice’s government in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with those of neighbouring cities to get a different perspective. Where one family tended to dominate – the Viscontis in Milan, the Carrara in Padua, the Scaligers in Verona – when a ruler died there was no defined constitution to see the city through the ensuing political vacuum and power struggles. In Venice, by contrast, membership of the Great Council was for life: no one could remove a member under normal circumstances or, from the early fifteenth century onwards, add members from outside the existing noble families, so the Council was impossible to manipulate.

  Of course, the size of the Great Council – perhaps 1,100 members in 1300, eventually nearly 2,500 as the original families spawned new branches – made it unwieldy, but a number of smaller councils appointed by it ensured effective decision-making. It elected, for instance, a Senate of about three hundred members which exercised day-to-day supervision over the city’s affairs; among other functions, it controlled foreign policy, appointed military commanders and fixed taxation rates. The Senate in its turn appointed a smaller committee, the Collegio, a group of counsellors presided over by the doge, which met almost every day to deal with detailed administrative matters. And there was an even smaller council, the Signoria, composed of the doge and leading councillors, which implemented executive decisions. Its informal power, particularly in shaping foreign policy, was often considerable. All these councils met in the Doge’s Palace, the Grand Council in a massive room constructed in the 1340s and still intact (albeit with later decoration, the original having been destroyed by fire). Although many doges were men of impressive ability who had made their way to the top through success in war or trade, in practice the office was a ceremonial one, and increasingly so with time. By the sixteenth century an English traveller was able to note, ‘though in appearance he seemeth of great estate, yet indeed his power is but small. He keepeth no house, liveth privately, and is in so much servitude that I have heard some of the Venetians themselves call him an honourable slave.’ The doges were not even allowed to have portraits of themselves in public places. The result was that the Serenissima, the most serene republic, maintained its own identity which was sustained from generation to generation.

  Yet, however impressive the city in the magnificence of its places and public squares and its apparent harmony and commercial success, Venice as a trading centre was always vulnerable to rivals and the rise of new states. Its commercial single-mindedness ensured that it aroused enmity. ‘If you knew how everyone hates you, your hair would stand on end,’ a duke of Milan told the city in the fifteenth century. It was at times of crisis that the horses found themselves transformed into symbols of Venetian independence. There is a story (recorded for the first time in 1497 by a German knight passing through Venice on his way to a pilgrimage) that in the second half of the twelfth century Frederick Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor from 1152 to 1190) had threatened to destroy Venice and after his victory plough up the Piazza and use St Mark’s as a stable for his horses. The Venetians had seen him off, and it was said that to celebrate their success they had placed the horses on the portico of the basilica and had the Piazza paved with a herringbone pattern to represent ploughing as a riposte to his taunt. The story is found repeated in accounts from the early sixteenth century, some of which replace the emperor with a sultan. Barbarossa had, of cou
rse, lived in the period before the horses had even been captured by the Venetians; but the myth shows how strongly they had become identified with the survival of the city.

  Another story, this one with a real historical setting, dates from 1379. A war between Venice and its rivals Padua and Genoa had reached a critical stage after Venice’s territories had been invaded and the Genoese, with help on the mainland from Paduan troops, had occupied the neighbouring port of Chioggia and so threatened to close off the lagoon. The Venetian Senate was reduced to sending ambassadors to treat for peace. Their approaches were rebuffed by the Genoese commander. ‘By faith. You will never have peace from the lord of Padua nor from Genoa until we first put bridles on those unreined horses of yours which stand on the royal house of your Evangelist St Mark.’ So by the late fourteenth century the horses were known as emblems of Venetian liberty, to be ‘reined in’ as a symbol of victory over the city. The Venetians survived the crisis – and there is an appealing story, recorded in a Venetian letter of 1815, that the bits were broken off the horses at this time so that they would be seen by observers to have no restrictions on them.

  Yet the political setting within which the horses enjoyed their new status as defenders of Venetian liberty was changing. So long as there was free access to the mainland for supplies and one or two of the many routes into Europe were open, Venice was reasonably secure. During the fourteenth century, however, the states of the mainland were becoming more effective and stable, and persistent warfare between England and France, the Hundred Years War (actually lasting from 1337 to 1453), blocked many routes. Gradually a radical new strategy began to be formulated: Venice should aim to gain permanent control of parts of the mainland – the areas that came to be known as the terraferma. A toehold had already been established when Treviso, only a few miles inland, was secured in 1339; but in 1404–5, after Milan had lost its aggressive leader Gian Galeazzo to the plague, Venice took advantage of the power vacuum to seize Vicenza, Verona and Padua. In 1420 the acquisition of the Friuli and Udine brought its territory up to the Alps.

  This shift in policy brought new dimensions into Venetian life. On the one hand, the city could now hardly avoid becoming entangled in the complexities of Italian politics; yet on the other new opportunities opened up for its citizens to replace trade with income from land. In the 1420s and 1430s, while dominant both on the land and across the Mediterranean, Venice enjoyed an economic boom – but almost immediately it came under pressure again when, in one of the great turning points in European history, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. From now on Venice was on the defensive in the east. There was an important advance in 1489 with the acquisition of Cyprus, but elsewhere the Turks began nibbling away at Venice’s colonies. Negroponte on the inner coast of Euboea, the main Venetian base in the northern Aegean, was lost in 1470; Modon and Corone, in the Greek Peloponnese, ‘the two eyes of the Republic’ as they were known from their important position on the routes to the Levant, in a disastrous war at the end of the century. From the top of the Campanile, the Venetians could see the smoke rising from Turkish raids on the Dalmatian coast. Equally ominous for Venice’s long-term prosperity was the news in 1498 that Portuguese ships under Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope. There was now a passage by sea, which by-passed the difficult and expensive land routes across Asia, through which the riches of the east travelled to the ports of the Black Sea and the Levant, where the Venetian galleys met them. The sailors of the Atlantic states – Portugal, Holland and England – were now able to siphon off Venetian trade, although the process was a gradual one and Venetian ingenuity and resilience kept the city’s economy bouyant for some time to come.

  A few years later, Venice’s increasingly ambitious forays on the mainland led to serious trouble. A French invasion of Italy in 1494 had unsettled the city-states and Venice took the opportunity to expand even further into northern Italy. Reactions, unsurprisingly, were hostile. The Austrian Habsburgs were outraged when Venetian forces moved along the coast to the east to grab Trieste, the French staked their own claims to cities now free of the control of Milan, while the small neighbouring city-states of Mantua and Ferrara disputed their own borders with Venice. The final straw came when Venice attempted to move into papal territory in Romagna. In retaliation, in 1508 the pope organized an alliance, the League of Cambrai, against the interloper. Venice blustered that it was fighting on behalf of ‘Italy and Liberty’ but it was a hollow claim and impressed no one. The Venetian forces were routed at the battle of Agnadello near Milan in May 1509, and the humiliation became complete when even the cities of the terraferma closed their gates against the fleeing troops. They ended up in disorder on the shores of the lagoon. ‘In one battle,’ wrote the Florentine statesman and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘the Venetians lost what in eight hundred years they had won with so much effort.’ Venice recovered much of the terraferma in the years that followed, but its triumphalism, expansion and even its status as a European power had been dealt a severe blow.

  So by the early sixteenth century we are talking of a city which was still wealthy, which was still untouched by actual invasion (there was talk of Venice’s ever-intact virginity, a fitting accolade for a city that claimed the protection of the Virgin Mary), but whose activities had been, and would continue to be, limited and even undermined by new political and economic realities. In Italy itself the most significant of those new realities was the rise of the Habsburg empire under Charles V, who dared to sack Rome in 1527. It was a nasty shock for Venice when Charles, Pope Clement VII and the king of France, whom Venice considered at this point an ally, came to an agreement at Bologna in 1530 which sorted out the affairs of Italy to their mutual advantage with virtually no reference to Venice.

  This could have been some kind of final blow to the republic, a humiliation so profound that it broke the city’s resolute spirit. On the contrary: remarkably, Venice now entered upon what one might call a contented middle age, which turned into nearly three hundred more years of continued independence. The secret of its survival lay in its enduring political and social stability and a realism honed by centuries of hard commercial bargaining. The ‘new look’ was summed up by Gasparo Contarini in his De magistratibus et republica Venetorum, a book written during the hazardous years of the 1520s but published only in 1543. Contarini’s approach was an optimistic one. He did not dwell on the terrible blows Venice had suffered; rather, he marvelled that the city had endured at all. Contarini evolved his own rationale for Venice’s survival, which he attributed to its unique constitution, with its mixture of unity and diversity, its maintenance of an ordered hierarchy that was yet open to change from below. ‘Such moderation and proportion characterise this Republic and such a mixture of all suitable estates that this city by itself incorporates at once a princely sovereignty, a governance of the nobility, and a rule of citizens so that all appears as balanced as equal weights.’ Drawing on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, Contarini assumed that there was a perfect state of government, a natural order of things under which a city grew organically to a final and irreversible state of well-being – and in his view, joy of joys, Venice had achieved it. If one looked at past examples, Contarini went on, Venice could be compared with Greece under the Roman empire. The Greeks may have been subservient to the power of the Roman legions, but everyone knew that they remained the arbiters of culture and civilization.

  By now the horses of St Mark’s, which may originally have been associated with the imperial ambitions of the doges, had become part of the city’s heritage. The point is made in a silver plate, probably crafted in the sixteenth century, which survives only in a nineteenth-century terracotta copy, on which they are shown arriving in Venice on a sea shell. The setting draws on classical motifs. The doge, dressed as an ancient warrior, is placed beside the horses. Above him floats a personification of Victory holding a victory wreath, which she offers him while her other hand unfurls a banner of St Mark. The doge
himself offers the horses to another personification, this time of Venice herself, shown with a lion peacefully settled beside her. Nereids and tritons cavort in the water. So the horses are integrated into the history of Venice, almost as if they were a divine offering to the city.

  10

  THE SEARCH FOR THE HORSES’ ORIGINS

  WE LAST MET PETRARCH STANDING ALONGSIDE THE DOGE on the loggia of St Mark’s in 1364. We now go back to a letter he wrote over twenty years earlier, in 1341, to a friend of his, Giovanni Colonna. Petrarch reminisces of the time he and Giovanni had spent scrambling over the ruins of ancient Rome. They had ended up on the roof of the Baths of Diocletian, where they had perched while discussing the history of the city. Petrarch, as he remembered, had divided the Roman past into two: the years before the coming of Christianity, when Rome ruled its great empire, and the Christian centuries that followed. In this Petrarch was expressing a new, distinctively Renaissance, attitude towards the past – one in which it was broken down into historical periods that were then distanced and explored as discrete entities, rather than being seen as an undifferentiated mass of ruins and texts.

  Petrarch was careful not to denigrate Christianity (he claimed that the Pantheon, the finest classical building still standing in Rome, would never have survived had it not been protected by the Virgin Mary, whose church it had become), but he could never hide his enthusiasm for the grandeur of ancient Rome. He was one of those who lived through texts rather than through objects, and he approached the city through its great classical writers, above all the historian Livy and the epic poet Virgil, whose works he linked to what he found scattered in the ruins. Actually, he hated to use the word ‘ruin’ for what he found – he preferred vestigia, ‘traces’ of the past into which he could breathe life. Recall how he described the horses on St Mark’s; they ‘stand as if alive, seeming to neigh from on high and paw with their feet’. In his enthusiasm he tended to overlook any detail which might undermine his romanticized attributions. The pyramid on the edge of the walled city of Rome, built by the senator Cestius as a mausoleum in the first century AD and clearly marked with the occupant’s name, was claimed by Petrarch to be that of no less a figure than Remus, the joint founder (with Romulus) of Rome! For Petrarch the past was there to nourish the present. When he had an audience with the Emperor Charles IV, Petrarch