The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  However, the relationship between the Austrians and the Venetians continued to be an uneasy one. It was not that the Austrians were particularly oppressive; it was rather that they were bureaucratically inept and insensitive to the liberal nationalism which was sweeping through Italy as it was through many other parts of Europe. When a severe commercial depression hit Europe in the mid-1840s and spread to Venice, the Austrians proved incapable of providing any effective relief. Discontent grew, and on 18 March rioting in the Piazza led to the deaths of eight Venetians.

  The simmering unrest was galvanized into outright revolt by one of Venice’s great heroes, Daniele Manin. Manin, in his mid-forties by 1848, was a lawyer and the son of a lawyer. He had a mind of extraordinary energy which had absorbed not only six languages, including English, French and German, but the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, in a Venice under Austrian rule his talents and ideals appeared to have no hope of fulfilment – until the events of 1848 gave him his opportunity. The Venetians had never been a revolutionary people, their government over centuries having been rooted in the search for consensus; but it was just this propensity that Manin exploited. He persuaded the middle classes to throw in their lot with the poor and expressed their shared demands in simple but highly emotive oratory. He set the revolution in action with a speech from a table in Florian’s coffee-house, and on 24 March was declared, again in the Piazza, president of a new Venetian republic. Its foundation was celebrated with a ‘Te Deum’ in St Mark’s; and the cry of ‘Viva San Marco!’, last heard in 1797, echoed across the Piazza.

  The republic was to last seventeen months, the city bravely holding out against the Austrian armies grouped around the lagoon until bombardment, famine and eventually cholera forced its surrender in August 1849. While Manin had many great qualities, in the end he failed to create a strategy for the city’s survival against a revived Austria (while the poor warmed to him personally, he remained at heart a bourgeois who would never risk a true revolution). Over the course of those seventeen months, however, the horses of St Mark’s had overseen some of the most dramatic scenes in Venetian history. The Piazza had found a new role as the focus of revolutionary fervour. Any Venetian could reach it in half an hour, and it had the capacity to hold most of the population. Here the great speeches of the revolution were made and news from the outside world passed on; and, as the Austrian guns began to reduce the western districts of the city, refugees sheltered in its colonnades. It was here from a balcony on 13 August that Manin made his last speech to the people of the city before going into exile, and here also that Hungarian whitecoats entered the city to reoccupy it.

  Venice in the 1850s was a sad place. ‘The former queen of the seas’, lamented one of its defeated revolutionaries, ‘has become a slave girl and the winged lion no more than a water rat.’ Many of its middle class had fled, and those who remained tended to see their future in collaboration with the Austrian overlords, while outside the city in the Veneto the Austrians subdued peasant unrest with mass executions. One gets a sense of the unease and the compromises involved from a diary account by the German composer Richard Wagner, who visited the city in the late 1850s and coached an Austrian band to play two of his overtures. ‘Several times,’ he writes,

  at the end of dinner I was surprised to hear my overtures all of a sudden. When I sat at the restaurant window [overlooking the Piazza] abandoning myself to the impressions of the music I did not know which dazzled me most – the incomparable square in its magnificent illumination filled with countless numbers of moving people, or the music which seemed to be wafting all these phenomena aloft in a resounding transfiguration … But there is one thing utterly lacking here which one would otherwise have expected from an Italian audience: thousands of people grouped themselves around the band and listened to the music with intense concentration; but no two hands ever forgot themselves to the extent of applauding, for any sign of approbation for an Austrian band would have been looked upon as treason to the motherland.

  Venice was united with the rest of Italy in 1866, not through its own efforts but as the result of the good offices of Louis Napoleon, emperor of the French, and the international diplomacy which followed the defeat that year of Austria by Prussia. The city’s incorporation into Italy was not, initially, a great success. While the body of Manin, who had died in exile in Paris in 1859, was welcomed back to Venice on the twentieth anniversary of the revolution with enormous fanfare – thousands of gondolas followed the funeral barge along the Grand Canal and Manin was buried in an arcade on the northern side of St Mark’s – the Venetians, who had enjoyed the vote in the short-lived republic, were not to regain it until just before the First World War. The imposition of a tax on flour by the Italian government led to riots.* Yet it was in these same years of the mid-nineteenth century that Venice was finding new meanings in the imagination of the European and American literati and bourgeois travellers. Everyone in European cultural life visited Venice at some time, and many gushed over its glories. ‘It is a great Piazza,’ enthused Charles Dickens on his first visit to St Mark’s,

  anchored like all the rest of Venice, in the deep ocean. On its broad bosom is a palace more majestic and magnificent in its old age than all the buildings of the earth, in the high prime and fullness of their youth. Cloisters and galleries – so light they may be the work of fairy hands; so strong, that centuries have battered them in vain – wind round and round this palace, and enfold it with a cathedral, gorgeous in the luxuriant fancies of the east.

  Many of Venice’s myriad palaces (two-thirds of them under repair, as John Ruskin noted on a visit in 1845) were now available for rent or sale cheaply – a situation which led to a strange mixture of new inhabitants. John Pemble, in his study of Venice in the past two centuries, Venice Rediscovered, notes the arrival of ‘a new generation of losers from the hectic casino of dynastic Europe’; but, in addition to discarded royalty (including some from France), many other kinds of exiles made their home here for a time. Some seemed drawn by the city’s air of nostalgia, finding an almost sensual pleasure in mourning Venice’s great past from one of its medieval palaces. Meanwhile, Byron’s romantic escapades consolidated the reputation of Venice as a city of sexual extravagance. It was possible to enjoy homosexual liaisons which would have been impossible in more stuffy and oppressive societies further north; a wealthy man’s private gondolier was often also his lover. The English aesthete John Addington Symonds, out on the Lido in the 1890s, caught the eyes of one such. ‘Angelo’s eyes, as I met them, had the flame and intensity of opals, as though the quintessential colour of Venetian waters were vitalised in them and fed from inner founts of passion.’

  Others found a vitality and gaiety in the city which were lacking elsewhere in Europe. For the American Henry James, who was to write two novels in which the city has a starring role, The Wings of the Dove and The Aspern Papers, the Piazza contained more joy than any comparable spot in the world. The Austrian Camillo Sitte saw St Mark’s as the ideal of urban planning. ‘So much beauty is united on this unique little patch of earth, that no painter has ever dreamt up anything surpassing it in architectural backgrounds, in no theatre has there ever been anything more sense-beguiling than was able to rise here in reality … the loveliest spot in the whole wide world.’

  Yet Venice was a city always close to decay. The withdrawal of wealth and the passage of time sucked the great palaces towards destruction. The poet Shelley envisaged them under the waves covered in seaweed. ‘No time ought to be lost in visiting Venice,’ wrote a M. Valéry in 1835, ‘to contemplate the works of Titian, the frescos of Tintoretto … tottering on the very verge of destruction.’ John Ruskin noted the state of the Fondaco dei Turchi, the warehouse where the Ottoman traders stored their products, in the 1850s: ‘the covering stones have been torn away from it like the shroud from a corpse and its walls, rent into a thousand chasms, are filled and refilled with fresh brickwork, and the seams and hollows are choked with clay and whitewash
, oozing and trickling over the marble.’ The city became associated with death, especially of creative men. Wagner died here in 1883; as did Diaghilev (1929) and Stravinsky (1971). The mood was caught by Thomas Mann’s haunting Death in Venice (1912), in which the themes of homosexuality and death are intertwined. The ‘hero’, Gustav von Aschenbach, harbours an unconsummated love for a young Polish boy, Tadzio, against the background of a cholera epidemic which the authorities are desperately trying to conceal from the city’s visitors. In the closing sentences of the story Aschenbach collapses and dies, his last moments absorbed with watching Tadzio at the edge of the sea, ‘in front of the nebulous vastness’. Few books have caught the ambiguities of the city so evocatively.

  It was the emotional use of Venice by expatriates which gave rise to intense debate about the maintenance of the city. However much the romantics wallowed in the sense of decay, one could hardly let the city collapse into the lagoon. Should one restore or conserve? If one chose to restore, how far should one go? The word repristino was used to describe the process of renewing a building, but for many romantics (notable among them, as we shall see, Ruskin) this risked becoming lucidatura, a more radical cleaning which destroyed the patina of ages. The restoration of the crumbling Fondaco dei Turchi in the 1860s was so extensive that one can hardly recognize the subjects of the ‘before and after’ photographs as the same buildings. For new buildings, composite styles which mixed Byzantine with gothic, venezianita as they were known, developed. This was becoming an ersatz city, not least in the contrast between the luxurious new hotels on the Lido and the crumbling, picturesque vistas which their pampered guests had come to view.

  With Venice taking on so many exotic roles in the imagination, antiquities so solid and enduring as the horses of St Mark’s were bound to fade into the background, and we find them reappearing as mere bit-players in a greater drama. Thus, for example, the popular poet Samuel Rogers, in his verse tales of Italy (published between 1822 and 1828), wove them into his melodramatic tale of Enrico Dandolo setting off from the porch of St Mark’s on the Fourth Crusade:

  He sailed away, five hundred gallant ships,

  Their lofty sides hung with emblazoned shields,

  Following his track to fame. He went to die:

  But of his trophies four arrived ere long,

  Snatched from destruction – the four steeds divine,

  That strike the ground, resounding with their feet,

  And from their nostrils snort etherial flame

  Over that very porch.

  A copy of these poems, illustrated by the artist William Turner, was given in 1832 to a young Englishman for his thirteenth birthday. Thus began John Ruskin’s love affair with Venice. Ruskin visited the city for the first time in 1835, with his family, and returned on his own in 1845. The first volume of his celebrated The Stones of Venice was published in 1851. Venice gave Ruskin, always a man full of his own frustrations, a cause, an outlet for his aesthetic yearnings. Exploring the mass of surviving architecture, much of it in decay in what was now an impoverished city, he was drawn irresistibly to the glories of Venetian gothic. Just as Winckelmann had associated great art with liberty, so Ruskin made Venetian gothic and Venetian greatness inseparable. Venice’s decline had begun in the 1420s, he argued (a view for which one could find some supporting historical evidence), at the same time as its art began to abandon gothic for the Renaissance. For Ruskin, the significance of gothic art was not that it was pleasant to look at; it was important because it brought out the creativity of the individual artisan, who had the freedom to create his own interpretations of style. Ruskin revelled in the incongruity in architectural style and the juxtaposition of different colours. He hated the way in which the Venetians seemed to discard their heritage. ‘Off go all the glorious old weather stains, the rich hues of the marble which nature, mighty as she is, has taken ten centuries to bestow,’ he wrote to his father as he observed a cleaning of St Mark’s. The Renaissance was the creation and preserve of intellectuals, who had tried to impose order from above. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin claimed that he had ‘no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption’. In his index of Venetian buildings Ruskin did not even include Sansovino’s Loggetta, seen by many as one of the most charming pieces of Venetian architecture. Palladio aroused particular scorn for his cold formality.

  For Ruskin, the horses are Greek, and he uses them in his campaign against the austerity of the Romans. They are, in fact ‘symbols to Europe of the destruction of the Greek empire by the Romans’. In The Stones of Venice they make their appearance towards the end of the crescendo of prose with which he describes St Mark’s.

  Beyond these troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away – a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure house, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother of pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic … and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and life – angels, and the signs of heaven and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers – a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength.

  Faced with this explosion of coloured prose one can, perhaps, have some sympathy with Henry James’ view that ‘one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised [Ruskinian] prose’; but while Ruskin was ending his days in his home overlooking Lake Coniston in the English Lake District (he died in January 1900), his books inspired another writer to become obsessed with Venice. Marcel Proust first discovered Ruskin as an enthusiast for French gothic architecture, but it was through Ruskin that he set out, in May 1900 with his mother, for Venice ‘in order to have been able before dying, to draw close to, touch and see the embodiment of Ruskin’s ideas on domestic architecture in the Middle Ages in palaces that are crumbling, but which are still rose-coloured and still standing’. Proust, like others, catches the mood of a city of transient beauty on the brink of collapse. In an early work, On Reading Ruskin, he meditates on the columns in the Piazzetta and suggests that standing ‘with all their slender impenetrability’ among the rush of the Venetian crowds they set aside ‘the inviolate place of the past, of the past familiarly risen in the midst of the present’ – the theme which haunts so much of Proust’s work. It is hardly surprising that Venice comes to pervade À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the visit of May 1900 is recreated. The narrator of the novel, mourning the death of his beloved Albertine, comes to Venice with his mother. She herself is in mourning for her own mother. Standing in the Piazzetta, she remarks how much her mother would have liked the order of Venice – the two columns, which her son had told her came from a palace of Herod, and, fitting in as if in spaces kept specially for them, the pillars from Acre and the four bronze horses. Here is Venice in which the horses have become an integral part of the whole, so neatly slotted into the city that it was almost as if they had been made for it.

  There is a different atmosphere in a poem, ‘San Marco’, by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Through his patroness; Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whose castle on the coast at Duino, near Trieste, inspired his famous elegies, Rilke came to know Venice as a city of transient aristocrats. He was haunted by the contrast between the glitter of contemporary society and the brooding weight of the past. In ‘San Marco’, written in recollection in Paris in 1908, he contrasts the shining gold of St Mark’s with the darkness of the Venetian state. For him, the horses
come to symbolize the past. Up on the loggia, he muses:

  A photograph of the horses on the loggia, dating from the time that Rilke wrote his poem ‘San Marco’. (Alinari Archives, Florence)

  How can all this endure?

  Passing along the narrow gallery

  hung like a catwalk from the canopy

  you find the shining city still secure

  yet somehow wearied by her history,

  so nearly crushed beneath the quadriga.

  (trans. Stephen Cohn)

  Even if they were now only symbols of the past, the horses could not escape being caught up in the turmoil of the twentieth century. The first threat was an unexpected one. For centuries the great Campanile had stood where the Piazza met the Piazzetta, and architects had always declared that it was totally secure. On 14 July 1902 the tower collapsed almost without warning. Part of Sansovino’s Library was torn down and his Loggetta shattered into fragments. The façade of St Mark’s was saved partly because the rubble, some eighteen thousand tons of it in total, piled up against the Colonna del Bando. The gilt angel which had lorded it over the city from the top of the tower came to rest in the central portal of St Mark’s, while a fine, snow-like deposit settled on the horses as well as all the surrounding surfaces. It was a miracle no one was killed; the atmospheric impact of the collapse was so powerful that a ship in the lagoon almost capsized. (It was said that one sea captain was so traumatized by returning to a Venice without the Campanile to welcome him that he went mad.) The horses may also have suffered from the impact, for on 29 August it was reported that one of them was ‘tilting over to a considerable degree, causing the horse itself to lean outwards’. It had to be propped up in a wooden cradle until it could be removed for repair, and was finally back in place in April 1904 just in time for the feast day of St Mark and the start of the rebuilding of the Campanile. Despite the claims of some purists that the Piazza looked better without the Campanile and the cries of the radical Futurists that the whole of Venice would be better off under the lagoon, it was reconstructed exactly as it had been before. Faced with the choice, Venice had reasserted continuity rather than change. Dov’era, com’era, as the phrase went: where it was, as it was.