The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  In the seventeenth century Venice became involved in another set of debilitating wars with the Turks. Crete, its last major possession in the Mediterranean, was lost in the 1660s. One Venetian raid on Athens had a disastrous effect when a Venetian shell blew up the Parthenon, which the Turks had been using as an arsenal. Venice’s debt soared during the second half of the century and economic decline was hastened by the gradual consolidation of French, Dutch and English inroads into the Levantine trade. The expansion of commerce with ports such as Trieste, just down the coast, which was part of the Austrian empire, bypassed Venice. A brief success in regaining the territory in the Peloponnese in the 1680s was negated by the cost of holding it, and it was surrendered back to the Turks in 1718.

  In the last century of its independence Venice enjoyed a final outburst of artistic glory, not only in painting but equally in music (Antonio Vivaldi) and theatre (Carlo Goldoni). For most people it is the sweeping views of Antonio Canal (better known as Canaletto), in which the serenity of the city is contrasted with the bustling activity of its great festivals or everyday life, or the more impressionistic sketches of Francesco Guardi, which define the art of the century. Equally important, perhaps, are the majestic frescos of Giambattista Tiepolo, the last Venetian painter who can be seen as a direct heir of Titian. Exploding with warmth and colour across the ceilings of Venetian palaces, they glorify the families of their patrons, placing venerable ancestors among the gods or seated between Wisdom and the Virtues. Here is the ancient family shoring up (or perhaps even creating) its heritage. The contrast between the achievements of an earlier generation and the realities of the mannered and directionless lives of the contemporary Venetian aristocracy is glaring. This is a final fling; and however much the art is weighted in illusions (‘My eyes are very pleased by Venice, my heart and mind are not,’ wrote the French philosopher Montesquieu), it is seldom without panache.

  By the eighteenth century, in fact, Venice had lost its purpose. When the Swiss-born writer Jean Jacques Rousseau served as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice between 1743 and 1744, his life seemed to centre on perceived slights to his status – not being able to have his private gondola but having to hire one when he needed one, petty disputes over possession of the keys to one of the theatre boxes allocated to the embassy. He seems to have become thoroughly imbued with the mood of the place; and yet his attitude to the Venetian government was condescending – the decadence of Venetian society, he said, was a consequence of the defects of its constitution, while the Council of Ten was ‘a tribunal of blood’. Increasingly this was the feeling of Europe’s intelligentsia and politicians, who derided the impotence of the Venetian government. ‘The English use their powder for their cannon, the French for their mortars. In Venice it is usually damp, and if it is dry they use it for fireworks,’ one observer remarked. Even the Piazza came in for its fair share of ridicule: ‘a large square decorated by the worst architecture I ever saw,’ was the dismissive comment of the historian Edward Gibbon. Venice was increasingly a coffeehouse city – Florian’s was founded in 1720 and Quadri in 1775; both still flourish today – while the courtesans gained in fame. Rousseau was told of their ‘gracefulness and elegant manners’ and superiority ‘to all others of the same description in any other part of the world’. This was, after all, the city of Casanova, whose sexual escapades in Venice and elsewhere were detailed in his autobiography.

  While many of the Venetians were concentrating their skills on voluptuous Venuses, Ariadnes or Dianas, real or imagined – the mid-eighteenth-century artist Giambattista Piazzetta is the master of the sensual female form – in other parts of Europe a more sober tone was beginning to predominate. It involved a return to the ancient world, but this time as a source of virtue and nobility, patriotism and stoic endurance, continence and self-sacrifice. The painting which exemplified this new approach was Jacques Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784–5). In this depiction of a myth from early Roman history, the three brothers Horatius swear on their swords that they will risk their lives in personal combat in order to settle a war with a rival city. Only one survives, but the war is won for Rome. David finds his theme in republican Rome, the period before Augustus becomes emperor. Increasingly among the earnest scientists and rationalists of the Enlightenment, we find the Roman republic elevated as a model for disciplined living in the service of the state. As already noted, this was the model which guided so many of the French revolutionaries, whose bourgeois education had been infused with Roman authors.

  An eighteenth-century view of a parade of bulls in St Mark’s Square by Battista Cimaroli (1687–1753). By this time the square was largely given over to pleasure. (Soprintendenza Gallerie, Valencia/Scala)

  Yet there were also those within this tradition of idealizing the ancient world who found their models elsewhere. The greatest art historian of the age, Johann Winckelmann (1717–68), was an enthusiast for ancient Greece rather than Rome. Winckelmann was born in Prussia, the son of a cobbler. Drawn to ancient Greece as a young man through reading Homer, he embarked on an academic career and by the age of thirty-one was the librarian of an aristocratic library in Dresden. Here he wrote his first essay on Greek art, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755). Then, having converted to Catholicism, he went to Rome and finally became Librarian at the Vatican. In his most celebrated work, A History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), he developed his theory of the relationship between art and history. He took it for granted that Greek art was supreme: ‘In the masterpieces of Greek art, connoisseurs and imitators find not only nature at its most beautiful but also something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty.’ (Note the influence of Plato.) However – and this is where Winckelmann takes a new direction in his criticism – Greek art was never static; it had its own rise to greatness and its own fall. The rise began with the so-called ‘archaic’ or ‘old’ period and reached its height (‘sublimity’ in Winckelmann’s terminology) in the fifth century BC (the period of Phidias and Polyclitus). The essence of ‘sublime’ art was ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’. Then followed the ‘beautiful’ age of Praxiteles and Apelles, the painter extolled by Pliny, of whose works none survived even in copies. However, towards the end of the fourth century came Alexander, and after him the Hellenistic period, when Greece had lost its freedoms and was ruled by monarchs. Finally, with the subjugation of Greece by Rome, Greek liberty was extinguished. From the time of Alexander art had become merely ‘imitative’ of what had gone before. The same cycle, a rise to a peak of ‘sublimity’ and ‘beauty’ followed by a decline into decadence, recurred at different periods in the history of art. Winckelmann defined another such cycle for the Renaissance, with the painters Raphael and Michelangelo defined as ‘sublime’, Correggio ‘beautiful’ and all who came afterwards merely ‘imitative’ of their great predecessors.

  Winckelmann went further in trying to define the conditions in which ‘sublime’ art flourished. Politically, he argued, it needed liberty: ‘it is to liberty above all that art is indebted for its progress and its perfection.’ This was an idea that he had absorbed from an early eighteenth-century English philosopher–aristocrat, the third earl of Shaftesbury, who had applied the theory to his own times in England. It helped, too, if the climate was right. In Greece, Winckelmann – who never visited the country – assumed, ‘a temperature prevails that is balanced between winter and summer.’ Those encountering the heat of a Greek summer might disagree, but there were respectable – and Greek – precedents for the view: the fifth-century BC historian Herodotus claimed that it was the ideal climate of Greece that bred men hardy enough to fight off the Persian invaders, who were themselves enfeebled by the heat of their country.

  Relating artistic work to its surrounding culture was an important development in the history of art, but in Winckelmann’s case it created its own problems. If one comes across a ‘sublime’ piece of art, does that mean that the period in which it was cre
ated must have been one of ‘liberty’? If a country becomes free, then does its art by some form of osmosis become great? If a warmer climate is needed to create the best artists, does this mean that one can never produce great art in a cold one? How far can one take this ‘cultural’ approach? Is the art of each culture understandable only in its own terms or can there be ideals which transcend cultures?

  These problems can be helpfully explored if one looks at the examples Winckelmann himself used to advance his arguments. The only antiquities he could see at first hand were those in Rome or Florence, although he also had access to books of engravings such as Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée. His favourite statue was the Apollo Belvedere, and his descriptions of it bordered on full-blown romanticism.

  This statue surpasses all other representations of the god, just as Homer’s description surpasses those attempted by all other poets … An eternal springtime, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes his body with the charms of youth and softly shines on the proud structure of his limbs … In the presence of this miracle of art I forget the whole universe and my soul acquires a loftiness appropriate to its dignity … From admiration I pass to ecstasy … I am transported to Delos and the sacred groves of Lycia – places Apollo honoured with his presence …

  Such an inspirational statue must, Winckelmann assumed, be a Greek original and he suggested that it had been brought to Rome by Nero, who is known to have looted extensively in Greece. Within a few years of Winckelmann’s death, however, it was noted that the marble was Italian, not Greek, and that the added tree stump by which the statue stood suggested that the original would have been bronze. (As bronze is more tensile than marble, a marble copy of a bronze often needs a support of some kind to enable it to stand without cracking.) Expert opinion now sees the Apollo as a copy from the second century AD of an original Greek bronze, modified to suit Roman taste – thus, far into Winckelmann’s decadent and imitative period.

  Winckelmann did not fare much better with his next great statue, the Laocoön. A Laocoön had been mentioned by Pliny, and the one dug up in 1506 was assumed to be the same. Winckelmann enthused over the heroic suffering shown by the priest as he struggled with the snakes. His gaze upwards was, in Winckelmann’s interpretation, a plea to heaven that his sons at least should be saved. He felt that the perfection of the statue was so obvious that it could not possibly be later than the reign of Alexander the Great, the moment when Greek art began to decline into imitation. In fact, the date of its making is still debated – one of the sons may well have been a late addition – but many modern authorities suggest the early centuries AD, again well into Winckelmann’s period of decadence. It has been perhaps justly said of Winckelmann that his mind was better than his eye.

  The Apollo Belvedere became the most famous statue of the classical world in the late eighteenth century after its endorsement by Winckelmann. By the nineteenth century it lost its place as taste came to prefer the less ornate classicism of the fifth century BC. (Museo Pio-Clementino, Vaticano/Scala)

  The problem of relating great art to periods of liberty showed itself in a more acute form with another of Winckelmann’s favourites: a fine torso in the Vatican, the so-called Belvedere Torso. This could be dated by its inscription to later than Alexander, and so during the period of imitation. How, then, could it be a great sculpture? Winckelmann fitted it neatly into the brief period after 194 BC when the Greeks had been freed by Roman arms from the rule of Philip of Macedon but had not yet succumbed entirely to Roman imperialism. This was decreed to be an ‘age of liberty’. More difficult to fit into Winckelmann’s scheme was a head of ‘sublime beauty’ of Antinous, the youth favoured by the emperor Hadrian, whose death had led the emperor to declare a cult in his memory. There are many statues of Antinous, none of which can be earlier than AD 130, when he died. Again an age of liberty had to be discovered to explain its greatness, and Winckelmann claimed that Hadrian ‘planned to restore their original freedom to the Greeks and had begun by declaring Greece to be free’. This was certainly an ingenious solution, but it showed just how much special pleading was needed to sustain his theory.

  These difficulties help explain Winckelmann’s approach to the horses of St Mark’s. He didn’t see them. It is possible he intended to do so in 1768, when he was returning to Italy from Germany via Trieste, just along the coast from Venice, and might have decided to break the journey back to Rome. We shall never know. In Trieste, Winckelmann became involved in a homosexual entanglement and was murdered by his ‘lover’. We are left with no more than his impressions of engravings of the horses he had seen, and he does not seem to have been inspired by them. In Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks he makes the general comment that ‘the ancients seem not to have been acquainted with the handsome varieties of different animals in different climes’ (I am using the first English translation of 1765) and he gives as examples the Marcus Aurelius, the Dioscuri (neither of which he had yet seen when he was writing) and ‘the pretended Lysippian horses above the portal of St Mark’s church at Venice’. All seem to have disappointed him.

  Winckelmann recognized that the horses were of copper. He seems also to have heard of examinations of the horses which had thrown doubt on the quality of their casting. Any lack of quality was largely attributable to the metal used: copper not only has a much higher melting point than bronze but also solidifies quickly; this tends to make the cast metal more porous than that of bronze, and also requires the casting to be carried out in smaller pieces, leading to a greater number of internal joins. Any close examination of the St Mark’s horses show that they have a mass of imperfections. However, Winckelmann had his own explanation for this. He had read in Pliny’s Natural History that at the time of Nero the art of casting was in decline. If the horses had imperfections, he now argued, it was because they had been cast in the age of Nero! There was supporting evidence in the gilding. Winckelmann and his neoclassicist supporters preferred marble to be white and metals to be untouched. This was the essence of the ‘noble simplicity’ of the finest Greek works. Gilding was by definition a sign of decadence and accordingly was assigned, on these grounds alone, to Roman imperial art. Thus in his History of Ancient Art Winckelmann writes that ‘we can form an idea of Nero’s vitiated taste from the fact that he caused a bronze figure of Alexander the Great, executed by Lysippus, to be gilded.’ A contemporary of Winckelmann, one Octave Guasco, writing in 1768, picked up the point and related it to the ‘four horses of Nero’, which were ‘among those works which were gilded, reflecting the bad taste of contemporary Roman decadence’. So, the argument ran, if the horses were gilded they must come from a decadent period, and this conclusion was correlated with the imperfections of their casting to mean Nero’s reign. Winckelmann’s method of dating is, of course, deeply flawed. The horses would be difficult to date in any case – there was little to compare them with and no reliable documentary evidence to place them – and for the time being the issue remained unsettled.

  Notwithstanding his contestable assumptions and assertions, the enthusiasm of Winckelmann inspired many of his contemporaries. ‘We learn nothing by reading Winckelmann,’ wrote Goethe, ‘but we become something.’ Goethe (1749–1832) was without doubt the most fertile mind of his age, a poet, a dramatist, a painter, even an architect, skills which he combined with an intense scientific curiosity. By the age of twenty-five Goethe was already a celebrity, not only in his native Germany but throughout Europe, and he remained so until he died aged eighty-three. Part of his importance for later scholars and readers derives from the tumultuous times through which he lived, including the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He was always ready with his own responses: as his biographer Nicholas Boyle puts it, ‘At each new birth pang of modernity, specifically in Germany, but also generally in Europe, he felt the pain, recollected and recovered himself, and attained and expressed understanding.’ His dominance of intellectual life
and breadth of interests were such that Nietzsche was to describe him as ‘not just a good and a great man, but an entire culture’.

  During his youth Goethe had been soaked in ancient history and literature, and Italy had always been the country he had most yearned to visit (Italian was the first foreign language he learned), but it was not until 1786, when he was in his mid-thirties, that he first went there. He crossed the Alps by the Brenner Pass, made his way to Verona (where he saw his first original Roman building, the amphitheatre) and then moved on to Venice, where he arrived on 28 September.

  Goethe had a romanticized view of Venice which originated with a toy gondola given him by his father who had visited the city when his son was still a child. While other men of his time, such as Rousseau, had derided the Venetian republic as corrupt and decadent, Goethe had a soft spot for it. ‘If their lagoons are gradually filling up and stinking and their trade is getting weaker and their power has declined, that doesn’t make their republic any less venerable to me in its whole conception and essence,’ he wrote; and one of his most powerful experiences arose from employing two boatmen to revive the ancient art, which belonged, in Goethe’s words, ‘to the half-forgotten legends of the past’, of singing to each other across the lagoon: ‘a solitary man singing into the far distance, in order that another in like mood may hear and answer him’. (The Romantic poet Byron was to do the same in 1818, but his singers, though taking to the lagoon, performed no further from each other than the opposite ends of a gondola.) He was enthralled by the range of Venetian theatre and warmed to the variety of human encounters he observed in his travels through the canals and calli (passageways) of the city. Nor was it only the city itself which impressed Goethe. Venice provided him, extraordinarily enough, with his first sight of the sea, and he was so enthused by this that he made his way to the Lido, which bordered on the open waters of the Adriatic, and explored the world of mussels, limpets and crabs.