The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Canova was exhausted by his efforts. The open hostility of the French crowds had been particularly distressing: when he tried to visit the Halle d’Études of the Académie Française he was pelted with bread pellets by the students, and he overheard one of the artists saying that he would like to stick a dagger into him. Denon addressed him to his face not as Ambassadeur, as his formal status required, but as emballeur, ‘packer’. But his position among the occupiers was assured, and he gained so much respect among the allied negotiators that other Italian cities began asking for his help in getting their own treasures back. His greatest coup was to forge a working relationship with the Austrian emperor, Francis II. Under the peace treaties, the Austrians were to be given permanent control of Venice, and any Venetian works of art in Paris were thus technically now Austrian rather than Venetian. Francis would have been entitled to have had them in Vienna, but he acquiesced in the argument advanced by Canova, like Quincy de Quatremère before him: that the setting of a work of art was as important as its intrinsic quality. The horses were to be returned, under the auspices of the Austrians, to Venice, and even before they had left Paris Francis was consulting with Canova over where they should be placed.

  So the horses were scheduled to be taken down from the Arc du Carrousel. On 25 September, an aide-de-camp of the prince of Schwarzenberg, the commander of the Austrian troops, visited Denon to tell him of the decision to dismantle the arch. This is a public monument, protested Denon, and falls outside any agreements that have been made. There was nothing he could do; but a rising tide of anger showed that the horses had captured the imagination of the French more than many of the other treasures. Crowds crammed the area around them in protest. It was cleared, and on 27 September Austrian troops closed off all the streets leading to the arch. When more crowds gathered along the quais by the Seine, they were scattered by Austrian cavalry. Henry Milton tells how the only place from which the French themselves were allowed to view the dismantlement was the gallery of the Louvre, where they mingled with English visitors. That whole day was spent getting just two of the horses down. English engineers were sent up to help, and they were seen cavorting in the chariot. Rumours later spread that it was English soldiers who scraped the gilding off the horses, although we now know that the scoring was deliberately done in antiquity.

  In its issue of 3 October the London Courier published a letter from a correspondent in Paris, reviewing the events of the past few days.

  I just now find that the Austrians are taking down the bronze horses from the Arch. The whole court of the Tuileries, and the Place de Carrousel are filled with Austrian infantry and cavalry under arms; no person is allowed to approach; the troops on guard amount to several thousands; there are crowds of French in all the avenues leading to it who give vent to their feelings by shouts and execrations … the number of cannons of the bridges has been increased.

  By 1 October the horses were off the arch and the figures of Victory and Peace and the chariot were seen lying on the ground in pieces. The monument was sacked, its bas-reliefs pulled off, but the statue of the emperor designed for it was left untouched in the Orangerie of the Louvre. Louis XVIII is reported to have observed the unhappy scene from the windows of the Tuileries. Henry Milton concludes his own description: ‘Justice, policy and good taste all imperiously demanded that this ill-devised trophy should not be suffered to exist, but it was impossible not to feel some pity for the humiliation and misery of the French.’

  On 16 October Canova was able to write in a letter:

  The cause of the Fine Arts is at length safe in port … we are at last beginning to drag forth from this great cavern of stolen goods the precious objects of art stolen from Rome … yesterday the Dying Gladiator left his French abode and the [Belvedere] Torso. We removed today the two first statues of the world, the Apollo [Belvedere] and the Laocoön … the most valuable of the statues are to go off by land, accompanied by the celebrated Venetian horses.

  Some of the works from Venice, in particular a Veronese ceiling, proved too difficult to move and remain in the Louvre to this day. The winged lion did eventually return, but only after an unhappy experience. While being dismantled from its position in the Esplanade des Invalides, it was dropped and broke into fragments, to the jeers of the watching French crowds. Finally reassembled and hoisted back on to its pedestal in Venice, it was high enough up for the repairs and restorations not to be noticed. Other works from Rome were left in Paris; about half the paintings taken, for instance, never returned, and there were some who criticized Canova for not doing more. Those who appreciated the complications of his mission knew better. An oration in his honour read before the Roman Academy of Archaeology in 1816 proclaimed that his restitution had prevented the loss of Italy’s creative genius.

  Meanwhile the Arc du Carrousel stood empty for only a few years. The memory of the horses was so powerful that a minor victory by the French over the Spanish in the 1820s was used as an excuse for recreating the quadriga, complete with replicas of the Venetian horses. This remains intact in Paris today.

  After his mission was successfully completed, Canova recognized the help he had been given by the British by creating four ‘Ideal Heads’, three of which he sent to Hamilton, Castlereagh and Wellington respectively. That for Hamilton was inscribed: ‘Antonio Canova made this gladly for William Hamilton a man of distinction and a friend in acknowledgement of his exceptional goodwill to himself and of his patronage in the recovery of artistic monuments from France’. Hamilton returned the compliment by asking Canova to come to England for a proper viewing of the most famous antique sculptures in existence, those brought by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens. How these helped reinvigorate the debate over the horses of St Mark’s is the subject of the next chapter.

  16

  GREEK OR ROMAN? THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DEBATES

  Before St Mark still glow his steeds of brass,

  Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;

  But is not Doria’s menace come to pass?

  Are they not bridled? Venice, lost and won,

  Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,

  Sinks like a seaweed, into whence she rose!

  Better be whelm’d beneath the waves, and shun,

  Even in destruction’s depth, her foreign foes,

  From whom submission wrings an infamous repose.

  BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,

  canto IV, xiii

  THE HORSES RETURNED TO VENICE BY LAND, AND IT SEEMS to have been a rough journey. At some point the decoration which had covered their collars, and which can be seen clearly in the engravings of the Zanetti cousins, was lost. It would have been all too easy for souvenir seekers to have prised it off – it may even have been removed in Paris. More dramatically, there are reports that the horses’ heads became detached (they had been cast separately and the join to the bodies concealed by the collars) and so it was that when they arrived in Venice on 7 December, having crossed the lagoon on a raft, they were taken to the Arsenale for repair. As we have seen, Canova had been asked by the Austrian emperor where they should be placed; he had suggested that they might stand two either side of the main entrance to the Doge’s Palace on the waterfront, gazing in fact straight across at Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio. He was opposed by the president of the Venetian Academy, Count Leopoldo Cicognara, who insisted that, as an ancient symbol of Venice’s pride, they be put back on St Mark’s. Francis, anxious to avoid upsetting Venetian opinion, acquiesced.

  On 13 December 1815 the Austrian governor of the Venetian provinces, Count Peter von Goess, officially handed the horses, still in the Arsenale, over to the mayor of Venice. The emperor was present, together with his chancellor, Prince Metternich, and his role was commemorated in an engraving in which Francis is presented as a classical hero: nude but with a robe hanging loosely from his arms over his body, he stands on a sea shell which floats in front of the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile, with the four horse
s, plumed and delicately posed, beside him. The theme is that of an apotheosis, the translation of a hero to heaven, a scene well known in classical art with the hero normally ascending upwards in a quadriga. It seems an appropriate way to have honoured Francis in this era of enthusiasm for classicism. In reality, the horses came round the eastern end of Venice on a raft on which the standards of Austria and Venice were displayed. A 21-gun salute heralded their departure from the Arsenale in the north of the city, massed troops awaited their arrival at the Piazzetta. They were then pulled along the Piazzetta towards St Mark’s between ranks of soldiers and hauled into place to the accompaniment of musket shots and cannon fire. An oil painting of the event, formally commissioned by Metternich from Vincenzo Chilone, one of Canaletto’s pupils, shows the horses waiting by the portal of St Mark’s for their elevation back on to the loggia.

  Canova was not in Venice to witness the horses’ return. He had gone straight on to London from Paris and stayed there until the first week of December. By early January 1816, however, he was in Rome to see the Vatican collection arrive safely home – after all, he was officially responsible to the pope for its rescue – and here he was created marquess of Ischia in recognition of his achievement. The occasion marked the end of a tumultuous six months. Following his diplomatic successes in Paris, he had been fêted in London: he had been honoured at a dinner at the Royal Academy, received by the Prince Regent (who slipped him £500 in a gold snuff box) and subjected to a whirl of social engagements and meetings with the leading British sculptors of the day. One of the highlights of his visit was his viewing of the Elgin marbles. Traditionally they had been credited to Phidias, or at least to a workshop acting under his control, and this bathed them in an aura of quality. In 1803 Elgin had taken drawings of his acquisitions to Rome specifically to show Canova, much of whose work was inextricably linked to classical models, and Canova had urged that they be left unrestored so that their original quality could be seen: ‘It would be a sacrilege to touch them with a chisel.’ It was an important moment in the history of taste. In the eighteenth century there had been a passion for restoration and many ancient sculptures had had spare arms and legs fitted to them to make them ‘whole’. Now damaged sculptures acquired a romantic cachet, and the Elgin marbles were never added to.*

  Francis restores the horses to Venice, which awaits their return as the sun rises behind the clock tower. A watercolour of 1815. In fact, the restoration went hand in hand with the economic collapse of the city. (Museo Correr/Venezia)

  After repairs in the Arsenale, the horses were taken round the eastern end of Venice by barge so that they could be ceremoniously welcomed at the Piazzetta. They arrived on 13 December 1815, eighteen years to the day after they had been removed. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  The horses arrive at St Mark’s before being restored to their place on the loggia. Oil painting by Vincenzo Chilone. (The Art Archive)

  The marbles had arrived in London in fragments between 1802 and 1812, although it was not until 1806 that the British public started to become aware of the importance of the collection. Installed first at a Park Lane mansion leased by Lord Elgin, they were then transferred to a shed at the back of Burlington House on Piccadilly, where it was possible to apply to view them. By the time Canova had arrived in London the marbles were well known, and there were impassioned debates over whether they should be bought from Lord Elgin for the nation. As the first major set of sculptures from the fifth century BC to be seen in western Europe, they were hard to assess against the well-known but much later favourites of the Roman collections. Some even doubted their age – a Mr Payne Knight, for instance, a prominent member of the Society of Dilettanti, insisted that they were Roman work from the time of Hadrian and of little interest. As the view of an adviser to many aristocratic collectors of antiquities, his judgements carried weight and he clung to them with determination, even suggesting at one point that the quality of the metopes, the panels which ran along the entablature above the columns, was so low that those who had carved them did not even deserve to be called artists. Most artists of the day, on the other hand, were bowled over by them, impressed by their simplicity and liveliness and above all their truth to nature. It had long been assumed, as in the Platonic tradition, that the ‘ideal’ statue of a human figure should be somehow more perfect than an actual human, just as Zeuxis’ painting of an ideal woman described in Pliny’s Natural History was composed of the finest points of five nude models. Yet here were sculptures which seemed to have been created directly from live models. (At one point two boxers were brought in to stand naked before them to make the point.) Instead of the bodies being beautifully proportioned, the muscles bulged according to the stress placed on them, sometimes on one side of the body only. The skin even contained veins, something that the ‘idealists’ had always said was incompatible with the ‘noble grandeur’ that Winckelmann had prescribed for this period of art. For those willing to look afresh at classical art they were a revelation.

  When William Hamilton invited his friend Canova to come and see the sculptures in their temporary resting place at Burlington House, Canova can hardly have needed much persuading; but he was probably unaware of the extent to which he would be used in the campaign to have them bought by the British government. Elgin had spent many thousands of pounds on transporting the marbles to England and the first offers from the government fell far below his expenses. The campaign to sell them had become embroiled in other complications. The influential Payne Knight continued to deny their importance, while the poet Byron, who was imbued with a love of Greece and a passionate commitment to its independence, virulently attacked Elgin for removing the marbles at all (he had actually been in Athens when Lord Elgin’s agents were removing the metopes and he claimed that their clumsiness had led to some being damaged), even though at first his own opinion of the marbles as a whole was no higher than Payne Knight’s. The end of the war, moreover, had brought an economic slump and there were others who pointed out the inequity of buying ancient sculptures when so many were starving.

  In the event Canova helped break the deadlock by announcing that the marbles were superior to the statues of the Vatican which he had just saved, and that they had opened his eyes to the skills of the ancients before these had been debased by the desire of later generations for ‘conventional and mathematical symmetry’. ‘Everything here breathes life, with a veracity, with a knowledge for art which is the more exquisite for being without the least ostentation and parade of it, which is concealed by consummate and masterly skill.’ It had been worth coming to London, he told Lord Elgin, simply for the purpose of seeing them. A rival frieze which had also arrived in London, taken from the temple of Bassae in the Peloponnese and dating from the later fifth century, a generation after the Parthenon, had been bought by the British government at auction for £15,000. In that case, said Canova, the Elgin marbles are worth £100,000. His remarks were quoted by virtually every witness who appeared before the parliamentary select committee which was considering the purchase. Eventually it was agreed to buy them for the nation for £35,000, and this sum was accepted by Elgin even though it was well below what he had spent on shipping and displaying them.

  As we have seen, as early as the fifteenth century the Venetian horses had been attributed to Phidias, and it was inevitable that comparisons would be made between the Parthenon reliefs and the horses. It was perhaps unfortunate that the issue was taken up by the painter Benjamin Haydon. Haydon, later well known as a painter of history scenes, had arrived in London in 1804 to study at the Royal Academy. He was only eighteen at the time, an unsettled young man, but totally convinced of his own genius. He was furious when in 1806 (he was still only twenty) his entry in the Academy’s annual exhibition was placed in a side room of Somerset House rather than being exhibited in the most prestigious gallery. The fact that it had been selected at all failed to calm the antagonism between him and the Academicians which smouldered for the rest of his life
. In 1808 he visited the marbles and, as he wrote later in his autobiography, was overwhelmed by them. ‘I felt as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind and I knew that they would at last rouse the art of Europe from its slumber in the darkness.’ Like others, he was enthralled by their truth to nature and he became obsessed by the details of the human bodies, spending hours in Burlington House copying wrists and feet. One feature which inspired him particularly was the head belonging to a horse from the quadriga of the moon-goddess, Selene, which ‘overflowed’ from the end of the eastern pediment. Writing to Elgin in February 1809, he enthused: ‘that horse’s head is the highest effort of human conception and execution; if the greatest artist the world ever saw did not execute them [the marbles as a whole] I know not who did – look at the eye, the nostril, and the mouth, it is enough to breathe fire into the marble around it.’

  Like every artist and connoisseur brought up on the superiority of the Vatican figures, Haydon was presented with the dilemma of relating the Parthenon sculptures to them. Over the next few months he gradually came to revise his view of the Apollo Belvedere, which he had followed Winckelmann and conventional opinion in applauding. By 1816 it had become to him no more than a work from late antiquity, a period ‘when great principles had given way to minute and trifling elegances, the characteristics of all periods of decay’. As was typical with Haydon, the exaltation of one work of art required the denigration of another, and it was now that the Venetian horses came to be caught in his sights. He had seen a cast of one of them, and in an article in the Annals of Fine Arts for 1819 reproduced a drawing he had made of it alongside the Parthenon horse which so excited him. Having assumed that the horses of St Mark’s were by Lysippus, in other words a mere hundred years later than the Parthenon, he lamented how ‘the great principles of nature could have been so nearly lost in the time between Pheidias and Lysippus’. He then launched into a diatribe. The great crime of the Venetian horses was that they were not true to life. No horse, says Haydon, could have sunken eyes as they did, because it would not have been able to see danger. The eyes of the Parthenon horse are alert to what is around them; those of the Venetian horses are not. The nostrils ‘of the Venetian horses seem wrongly placed, the upper lip does not project enough and there is an evident grin as it if had the snarling muscles of a carnivorous animal … it looks swollen and puffed as if it had the dropsy.’ How could Raphael and other painters who were inspired by the horses possibly think that by copying them they were emulating nature, ‘the great source of all beauty and truth’? Haydon was, of course, turning his back on the Platonic tradition and returning to one which saw nature, rather than idealized versions of it, as the source of inspiration for great art.