The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  gave him as a gift some gold and silver coins bearing the portraits of our ancient rulers and inscriptions in tiny and ancient lettering, coins that I treasured, and among them was the head of Caesar Augustus who almost seemed to be breathing. ‘Here, O Caesar,’ I said, ‘are the men whom you have succeeded, here are those whom you must try to imitate and admire, whose ways and character you should emulate: I would give those coins to no other save yourself.’

  Petrarch’s family background was Florentine, although he was actually born in Arezzo (in 1304), and he travelled widely all his life, both in Italy and in southern France. He had first visited Venice in 1321, when he was still a student, but did not return until 1349. It was only in his later years, when renowned as a scholar and poet and living in the university city of Padua, which was not yet under Venetian control, that he grew to love the city. In 1361 he decided to move there, and made a bargain by which he was given a respectable house by the state in return for leaving his books to Venice. He was an honoured guest, enjoying the admiration and patronage of the cultural elite of the city – and, as we have seen, receiving an invitation to stand alongside the doge and the horses on the loggia of St Mark’s during the victory celebrations in 1364. (Sadly, Petrarch’s promise to leave his library to the city was never honoured; he left Venice in distress in 1368, when a group of young intellectuals ridiculed his scholarship.)

  Petrarch appears to have motivated at least some of his admirers into taking an interest in the classical past even before he had become domiciled in the city. For instance, a manuscript of the Lives of the Caesars by the second-century-AD Roman author Suetonius was copied in the city in about 1350. The copiers illustrated their text with portraits of the emperors: most were taken from Roman coins, but there is also an illustration of Julius Caesar on horseback. It is virtually unheard of for a manuscript this early to be illustrated from Roman originals, and it seems reasonable to suggest that the classical scholar Petrarch’s visit to Venice in 1349 provided the inspiration. It is interesting to see that Caesar’s horse, standing with one foreleg raised, is clearly modelled on those of St Mark’s. The horses have been neatly slotted into a Roman past, back perhaps to the centuries in which they originated.

  That the Suetonius, a Roman text illustrated with Roman examples, is, for its period, unusual reflects the fact that Venice in the fourteenth century, before the terraferma had been acquired, was still unsure of its Roman heritage. More was to be gained – more had been gained – through the city’s links to the Byzantine east, where Constantinople provided a glittering model of eastern splendour and where Venice owned an empire scattered with ancient Greek cities and monuments. As we have seen, the doges drew on Byzantine models in constructing rituals through which to display their power. There was, too, a continual influx of Greeks into the city. ‘Though nations from all over the earth flock in vast numbers to your city, the Greeks are the most numerous of all; as they sail in from their own regions they make their first landfall in Venice, and they have such a tie with you that when they put into your city they feel they are entering another Byzantium.’ So enthused the Greek cardinal Bessarion, who was to leave his own library of Greek texts to the city. He was speaking with hindsight. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, which Bessarion had desperately tried to prevent by urging a new crusade, had brought a mass of refugees, many of them distinguished scholars, flooding into the city. They carried with them priceless Greek manuscripts, and one even finds a revival of Byzantine influence in Venice’s architecture at this time. Several Venetian churches of the late fifteenth century are modelled on Byzantine church plans.

  It was just in these years, however, that Venice also began appropriating a Roman past. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the predominant architectural style had been the Venetian gothic so beloved of the English scholar and artist John Ruskin. The supreme achievement of the gothic era was the Doge’s Palace, rebuilt along its façade with the lagoon when a larger meeting room was needed for the Great Council in the 1330s, and then extended in the fifteenth century in the same style along the Piazzetta. It was common for Italian city-states to create city halls, but Venice’s was unique in its openness to the world, an openness made all the more spectacular by its setting on the water’s edge: ‘through the immense windows of its upper storey the Ducal Palace breathes in the sun and the seas,’ as the French scholar Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan has put it. The design – a loggia set on columns with a solid mass of masonry above (with crenellations that are Islamic in inspiration) – echoes that of eastern buildings, in particular those of Mameluke Egypt, and – as so often in Venice – the finished building is like nothing anywhere else. Remarkably, the different styles – the classical columns, the Gothic tracery and the eastern ingredients – fit together in harmony.

  However, to the later despair of Ruskin, one can see other influences at work, especially those derived from Rome. While the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 might have given the inspiration for the thirteenth-century rebuilding of the façades of St Mark’s as a series of triumphal arches, by the fifteenth century the Roman influence is more pervasive. When a new gateway to the Arsenale, the naval dockyard, was built in 1460 it was modelled on an original Roman triumphal arch which was still standing in Pola, a Venetian city on the Dalmatian coast. Then there was the Scala dei Giganti, the great ceremonial staircase of the Doge’s Palace, completed in the 1490s, under which there is a small prison. The stairs were designed to recreate the final ascent of the victorious Roman general or emperor to the Capitoline Hill, at which moment his captives would be led away for execution. The ‘prison’ was built into the staircase as a symbol of this segregation of conqueror from conquered – ancient Rome brought into the heart of Venice.

  The turn towards a Roman architectural heritage was mirrored by a refashioning of Venice’s own past. An Itinerario, a journal of travels (in this case on the terraferma in 1483) by the young Venetian Marin Sanudo, who was to become one of the great diarists of Venetian daily life, details the Roman past of each city of Venice’s new empire. Then, in a history of Venice commissioned by the city government and published in 1487, we find the links between Venice and the mainland accentuated by stressing that the Venetians themselves were descended from Roman stock. Soon the older families of the city began constructing Roman pasts for themselves. The Cornaros managed to get themselves back to Scipio Africanus, who had defeated Hannibal at the end of the third century BC, while the Contarinis linked themselves to the Aurelii, the family of the greatly admired second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius.

  The point to be made is that Venice, unlike any other European city, managed to find roots in both the Roman and the Greek past. It had two heritages and could draw on either at will. It is fascinating to find that even St Mark was incorporated into this double heritage. A preacher in Venice in the middle of the eleventh century referred back to the translation of St Mark’s body to Venice. ‘As the East, until very recently, was lit up by a golden radiance, now it is the West which glows in the rays of his presence.’ Again, to take a fourteenth-century example, Debra Pincus has argued that the figures on the tomb of Doge Giovanni Soranzo show the amalgamation of eastern Byzantine styles with ‘the architectural solidity’ of western gothic.

  This quintessentially ‘international’ Venetian style was to be developed and elaborated in the years to come. How closely intertwined Greek and Roman became can be seen from the works of the great printer Aldus Manutius. By the time of his death in 1515, Aldus had published fifty-five texts in Greek and sixty-seven in Latin, as against only six in Italian. Thirty-one of the Greek texts were the first printed editions and confirmed Venice as the cultural capital of the Greek world now that Constantinople had been lost, but its production of Latin texts was no less important. Surrounded by relics from the past – architectural, artistic, literary – the Venetians recognized that they might be either Greek or Roman, or could even have lines of descent from both Greek and
Roman. This was the context in which the horses of St Mark’s would be viewed and appreciated.

  The man who first considered the horses as classical art in their own right was not Petrarch but one Cyriacus, a native of Ancona, an Adriatic city to the south of Venice. Cyriacus (c.1391–1453) had first become aware of the remains of the classical world when he studied a Roman arch from the reign of Trajan in Ancona. He realized that it was disintegrating and would soon be lost, so even though he could not speak Latin he copied out the inscription on the arch before it disappeared. (The inscription became his ‘trademark’ and he often reproduced it as a frontispiece to his works.) Cyriacus mastered Latin and then, during a stay in Constantinople, Greek, through the works of Homer, and embarked on extensive travels through the Mediterranean – sometimes as an envoy for Pope Eugenius IV, a friend of his; sometimes in his own capacity as a merchant of carpets, antiquities and slaves. His knowledge of classical literature was not so great as Petrarch’s but he absorbed, through his travels, a much greater awareness of the Greek contribution to the classical world. Like Petrarch, Cyriacus believed passionately in bringing the past alive. It was the responsibility of the scholar ‘to restore the dead … to revive the glorious things that were alive to those living in antiquity but had become buried and defunct … to bring them from the dark tomb to light, to live once more’. Unlike Petrarch, he valued objects more highly than texts, and during his travels he made detailed drawings of what he found. One of the great wonders of the ancient world was a temple to the cult of the Roman emperors at Cyzicus, a commercial city on the Sea of Marmara, built by Hadrian. Today only a mound remains on the site, but Cyriacus’ drawings provide a record of what was still standing in his day. It is thanks to him that the tomb of Philopappus in Athens, described earlier, is known in such detail, and he has also left the earliest surviving drawing of the Parthenon.

  Many of the cities Cyriacus visited during his travels in the eastern Mediterranean were, of course, outposts of the Venetian empire, and it was inevitable that he would come to Venice itself. He had actually visited the city for the first time with his father, also a merchant, when he was only nine. He returned as an adult in 1432 or 1433, when he is found selling ancient manuscripts and coins of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon to local collectors. It was on a slightly later visit, in 1436 or 1437, that he climbed up to the loggia of St Mark’s, examined the horses properly and recorded his thoughts about them:

  Then after we had looked at all the major sites of the city for three days we finally made our way to the holy and highly decorated temple of St Mark where first we were allowed to inspect – not once but as long as we liked – those four bronze chariot horses which are so splendid a work of art and most elegant design, the noble work indeed of Pheidias, and once the glory of the temple of warlike Janus in Rome.

  While Petrarch had recorded his enthusiasm for the horses, making no attempt at an attribution (‘some ancient and famous artists unknown to us’) and concentrating instead on their emotional impact, Cyriacus, less romantic and more interested in the accumulation of historical detail, tries to pin down their origin. He is ready to identify them as the work of one of the greatest sculptors of the ancient world, Phidias, whose work he believed he had seen on the Parthenon in Athens. He does not suggest an original location for the horses, but he must have known from his readings that the Romans looted masterpieces to take to the capital. He also associates them with a specific temple in Rome, but there is no record of why he chose the Temple of Janus (it was, in fact, a double triumphal arch rather than a temple) as their home in Rome.

  The practice of attributing admired statues to a great sculptor of the past was a common one not only in Renaissance Italy but in Roman times. Two huge marble horses, each with a naked horseman beside it, the Dioscuri, survived from imperial Rome and remained in their original setting in the city (where they can still be seen today, in what is now the Piazza del Quirinale). We now know them to be Roman copies, of uncertain date, of Greek fifth-century originals, but in the late empire they had been treated as the originals themselves and inscriptions had been added to them: Opus Fidiae and Opus Praxitilis, ‘the work of Phidias’ and ‘the work of Praxiteles’. Neither Praxiteles nor Phidias was a surprising choice for any sculpture of quality. Phidias’ links to the Parthenon and to the famous cult statue of Zeus in Olympia were well known, while Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, the first life-size statue of the goddess nude, had been copied and recopied since the fourth century BC.

  The names of these great sculptors of the classical past came to the fore in the Renaissance after the recovery of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, a work dating from the first century AD and translated into Italian for the first time by the Florentine sculptor Ghiberti in the fifteenth century. It is a long and rambling work that ranges over a bewildering variety of subjects, but it was highly influential in spreading the idea that sculpture and painting had reached a pinnacle of excellence in ancient times. For example Pliny told of the painter Apelles (fourth century BC), who could create a painting of grapes so realistic that birds would fly down to eat them. To show off his talent Apelles then persuaded some fellow artists each to paint a horse. Some real horses were then shown the assembled paintings. They remained unmoved, Pliny records, until they saw Apelles’ version, at which they neighed! Among workers in marble and bronze Pliny praised especially Phidias, Praxiteles and Lysippus, the favourite sculptor of Alexander. He claimed that Lysippus had created no fewer than 1,500 statues, many of them quadrigae, the greatest of which was ‘a Chariot of the Sun’ for the people of Rhodes.

  By the end of the sixteenth century Lysippus was also being credited with the four horses of St Mark’s. ‘They say they are the work of Lysippus,’ wrote Pietro Giustinian in 1560, and in 1581 another Venetian chronicler, Francesco Sansovino, was even more confident, pronouncing them ‘sculpted indeed by Lysippus’. He is echoed by the Englishman Thomas Coryat, who spent some time in the city in 1608, although Coryat had also heard an alternative story of a Roman origin. There was no evidence for Lysippus’ involvement other than Pliny’s text, but it was typical of the age to find a text or illustration – on a coin, for instance – and immediately link it to a surviving sculpture. It was in the mid-sixteenth century that the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai from Constantinople was first published, in Paris, and so the story of the set of horses from Chios above the hippodrome in Constantinople became current; many writers immediately identified them with the horses of St Mark’s, as some still do.

  Meanwhile, the life the horses were assumed to have led in Rome was elaborated. The most fruitful text was the Annals of the historian Tacitus, composed in the early second century AD, which told of the aftermath of the Emperor Nero’s peace treaty with the Parthians. On the basis of Tacitus’ writings it was believed that a quadriga might have come to Rome either as a gift from King Tiridates of Armenia, who had been confirmed in his kingdom by Nero and who had visited Rome in AD 66, or directly as loot from Parthia. Among the antiquities being amassed by Renaissance collectors were coins from Nero’s reign showing the triumphal arch erected on the Capitoline Hill in celebration of the victory over the Parthians, and these were believed to show the St Mark’s horses on the top. However, each of the horses on the coins is shown with its left leg raised, while the St Mark’s horses have either the right or left leg raised, and so the attribution is unlikely to be valid (see the illustrations on p. 48). Others claimed that the horses had originally stood on a triumphal arch of Augustus or even on his mausoleum. These different stories left many observers confused. Sansovino wrote that some believed the horses to be from Lysippus’ Chariot of the Sun, transported to Rome to be placed on Augustus’ mausoleum, then rededicated by Nero in celebration of the peace treaty with the Parthians, before being taken to Constantinople by Constantine! ‘Whatever the truth,’ he concluded, reasonably enough in the circumstances, ‘it is uncertain for everyone.’

  These attempt
s to find origins for the horses were stabs in the dark, as Sansovino suggested. As yet almost nothing was known about ancient sculpture. No one had sorted out a sequence of styles and so it was impossible to distinguish a statue from the classical period (480–323 BC) from one of the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC) and another from the Roman period (after 31 BC). Nor was it appreciated just how many statues from the ancient world had been lost – the vast majority, in fact – or how high a proportion of those that had survived were no more than copies of originals. For an illustration of just how confusing the remains of the past could seem, we can turn to an Itinerario by a Venetian subject, Fra Urbino from Belluno, who visited Athens sometime between 1475 and 1485.