The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  A much greater threat to Venice came when Italy joined the First World War in 1915. With the Austrians as the main enemy and the front not far away in north-eastern Italy, the horses were clearly under threat. Immediately war had been declared they were taken off the loggia and stored between sandbags in the Doge’s Palace. The precautions were justified. There were no fewer than forty-two Austrian air raids on Venice and one of the thousand bombs dropped fell right in front of the basilica, which by now was fully boarded up.

  Nineteen seventeen, in particular, was a terrible year for Italy. There were mass demonstrations and strikes; mutinies increased in number; and in October the Italian line in the north was broken by the Austrian and German armies. As an Italian retreat began, even Venice was threatened, and in November the horses were sent off on a long journey, first by boat to the mouth of the River Po and then inland by water until they reached a rail connection for Rome. As we have seen, many legends suggest that the horses either came from Rome in the first place or at least spent part of their life there before being taken to Constantinople; so it may have been a homecoming for them. They were certainly given an appropriate resting place, in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the mausoleum originally built for the second-century emperor Hadrian. With the end of the war they were briefly transferred to the Palazzo Venezia in the centre of the city so that they could be seen by the public before being returned to Venice – where it was reported that they arrived back considerably dented! It was not until November 1919 that they were reinstalled on the loggia.

  Three of the horses in the gardens of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, December 1918, before their return to Venice. (Alinari Archives, Florence)

  The horses being restored yet again to the loggia in 1919. Drawing by Achille Beltrame, published in the newspaper La Domenica del Corriere. (The Art Archive)

  The horses were taken down again in the Second World War, but as Venice was not immediately threatened by the fighting, they spent most of the war years in the cellars of the Doge’s Palace. They were not in place to see history repeat itself when Armando Gavagnin echoed Manin in declaring a new republic from a table-top at Florian’s after the downfall of Mussolini. (It lasted only forty-five days before the Germans reasserted control.)

  A new threat to the horses then came from the atmosphere. They had always been vulnerable because the copper in which they had been cast was porous and in parts very thin. With the growth of industrial activity around the lagoon after the Second World War, the air became increasingly polluted with the emissions from coal, oil and chemical plants. The atmospheric concentration of sulphuric acid increased with a rise in humidity, and condensation or rain brought the acid to rest on any exposed metal surface. Tests on the horses in the mid-1970s showed that chemical reactions were taking place in the copper and that the gold leaf was becoming separated from the metal as acid ate between the gilding and the bodies of the horses. To test the severity of the effects, three of them were given a wash in 60 litres of water and the process repeated (60 litres is about the amount of rainfall they would encounter in an average heavy summer downpour). The results showed that acids and salts on the surface of the copper were dissolved by the water, and that each horse lost on average 20 grams of copper and 150 milligrams of gold as it ran off. This appeared to be solid evidence that the surface was deteriorating and formed the background to a campaign by the company Olivetti to have the horses placed under cover. After an exhibition, in which one of them starred as a centrepiece, had toured Europe and the United States, in 1983 the horses were placed in their present setting inside St Mark’s.

  18

  DENOUEMENTS

  HAVING ARRIVED AT THE POINT WHERE THE HORSES ARE stowed under cover in St Mark’s, it is time to sift through the evidence on their dating. As we have seen, almost every century from the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD, a span of nine hundred years, has its supporters. It is not only the variety of dates – and places – which surprises, but the assurance with which each scholar proposes his or her own conclusion. Let us take a sample of such attempts from the past hundred years. There has, for instance, been some support for a casting in or near Rome. The German historian Lehmann Hartleben, writing in 1927, compared the Venetian horses with bronze horses excavated at Herculaneum (the neighbouring city of Pompeii, destroyed with it by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79) and ‘because of their imposing structure, their prominent bellies and lightly modelled chests’ identified them as Augustan, in other words with the end of the first century BC. In her Art in Ancient Rome (1928), Eugenie Strong echoes Hartleben in seeing the horses as Augustan and proposes that they were made in Rome to adorn either a triumphal arch in the Forum or the Arcus Tiberi on the Via Sacra, the ‘sacred’ processional way which ran through the centre of the ancient city. Gisela Richter, in a book on animals in Greek sculpture also published in 1928, sees them as Roman works which were inspired by the Parthenon frieze. All this confidence – and yet there is not a shred of evidence that the horses originally came from Rome.

  One of the most exact datings of all, but from a very different period, was proposed by Sidney Markman, a professor of Fine Arts at the National University of Panama. In his The Horse in Greek Art (1943), Markman rejected outright any claim to Roman origin. He argued that they were the same horses as those from Chios which stood on the hippodrome gates in Constantinople. He then assumed that there was a progression in the way horses were portrayed in the art of the Hellenistic period, from the less to the more ‘dramatic’. Relying on this single theme, he took as a starting point the head and shoulders of a monumental marble horse from the celebrated mausoleum at Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in south-western Turkey), dating from about 350 BC (and now in the British Museum). The proportions of the St Mark’s horses are apparently the same, but they are ‘much more dramatic and developed’. Markman then took a fully ‘dramatic’ horse, one shown rearing up in the frieze on the famous Great Altar from Pergamum, which he dated from between 180 and 160 BC (modern scholars are not so sure; it may be much earlier). On the St Mark’s horses, this ‘dramatic effect is there only in part’ – and so they had to be fitted in chronologically between the two other sculptures. As the way the skin is sculpted on the Venetian horses ‘is not a fourth century characteristic’, they cannot be placed before the end of the fourth century. Markman eventually, on stylistic grounds alone, settled on a date of 310–290 BC, which he put forward with complete confidence. Yet one group of scholars responded to Markman’s analysis by saying that they could not see any resemblance at all between the St Mark’s horses and the ‘huge muscular horses’ of the quadriga of the mausoleum or the horses on the Pergamum altar.

  An even more exact date within these twenty years was proposed in the 1960s by a German scholar, J. F. Crome. Crome argued that the horses were not those from Chios but those which stood in the Milion in Constantinople alongside the chariot of the sun (the view taken in this book). On the basis of documentary evidence that Constantine looted Delphi for statues to bring to his new capital, Crome suggested that they might have come from there. Indeed, a pedestal beside the sanctuary has been found which appears to have supported a quadriga. Even more exciting was the discovery that the pedestal bore an inscription which showed that whatever had stood there was a votive offering of the Rhodians. Crome then remembered that in Pliny’s Natural History Lysippus was said to have made a chariot of the sun for the Rhodians. The horses, argued Crome, were none other than those from this chariot, erected in Delphi as a thanks offering for the famous victory of the city of Rhodes over Demetrius Poliorcetes, who had besieged it in 304 BC.

  This all seemed rather fanciful, especially as alternative sources suggested that Lysippus’ chariot was in Rhodes itself (and Pliny’s account can be read to support this). Pausanias makes no mention of a chariot of the sun by Lysippus in his description of the sanctuary at Delphi, and it is unlikely he would have missed out such a major work. Again, it is likely that the chariot would
have been recorded alongside the other works of art listed in early Byzantine sources as having been removed by Constantine from Delphi.

  In his 1981 study of the horses, I Cavalli di San Marco, Vittorio Galliazzi rejects Crome’s thesis but is happy to accept that the horses come from the school of Lysippus, and so date from the late fourth century BC, or, alternatively, may have been cast from a Lysippus original. Although no horse sculptures by Lysippus survive, Galliazzi takes as his model the horses shown on the so-called Alexander sarcophagus from Sidon (now in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul). This dates from about 310 and is probably the sarcophagus of the last king of Sidon, who chose to associate himself with Alexander and so had scenes of Alexander in battle sculptured in reliefs on the side. The war horses are shown rearing in battle and look somewhat more sturdy than the St Mark’s horses, so the comparison is not an exact one. Galliazzi goes on to suggest that the horses are those described as having been brought from Chios by Theodosius II (although he assumes in his reconstruction that the heads of each pair look outwards, while Niketas Choniates described them in the twelfth century as ‘eyeing each other’).

  So, even confining oneself only to the span of three centuries or so on which modern scholars have focused, how can one begin to home in on a more precise date? Many of these scholars started by ‘reading’ styles into the horses. Crome, for instance, claimed that they had ‘Persian’ characteristics, incorporated by Lysippus to highlight the relationship between the people of Rhodes and those of Persia, which was, he argues, consolidated by their conflict with the Macedonian Demetrius Poliorcetes. Markman analysed the degree of ‘drama’ he saw in the horses. Galliazzi found the aesthetic language of Lysippus there. Some have argued that a certain nervousness is characteristic of horses of the Hellenistic period, and have then proceeded to suggest that the horses of St Mark’s either are nervous, and thus Hellenistic, or are not nervous, and thus from a different period! One is left feeling that any assessment of the style of the work seems to come as much from the heads and eyes of the observer as from the horses themselves. There are as many scholars convinced that they are Roman in style as there are convinced that they are Greek or even Persian. Each scholar seems to be able to highlight some characteristic – often only one – which is then used to define the style, and hence possibly the date, of the horses as a whole.

  There is a good reason why it is so difficult to sort out the style of a classical sculpture. As soon as the two great civilizations of Greece and Rome encountered each other, their art became mixed. The Romans recognized that the Greeks could, in the words of the poet Virgil, ‘cast more tenderly in bronze and bring more lifelike portraits out of marble’ than they could, and their response was to imitate Greek art, either by making direct copies of Greek originals or by creating Roman statues which incorporated Greek styles. The Emperor Augustus provides a particularly good example of a patron whose enthusiasm for the classical Greek art of four centuries before his time was reflected in the art he commissioned. So the reliefs of the Augustan Ara Pacis, the altar of peace in Rome which dates from the end of the first century BC, echo the reliefs of the Parthenon; and Augustus himself, in the celebrated Prima Porta statue, shows himself off as a Greek hero. So long as Greek art held aesthetic or cultural value, there was every incentive for its styles to be incorporated into later classical art. Recent scholarship shows how traditional styles were being reworked, or ancient works restored, well into the fourth and fifth centuries AD, and surviving alongside Christian art. This is one reason why the horses have proved so difficult to date. Styles from the classical Greek and Hellenistic periods reappear over the Roman centuries.

  We noted earlier how the horses’ proportions were distorted for visual effect. In addition, one cannot escape the feeling that elegance has been ‘built’ into them, especially into their expression and the gracefulness of their heads. An example of this elegance is the short ‘Greek’ mane. This mane appears in Greek art as early as the eighth century BC and is found as late as the fourth century AD, in the horses drawing Constantine’s quadriga on his triumphal arch in Rome, for instance – even though we know from contemporary accounts that in real life the Romans valued ‘a mane thick and falling on the right side’, as one fourth-century authority on horses put it. In Rome itself, horses are often shown with flowing manes – as in the examples of Marcus Aurelius in his triumphal chariot and the bronze statue of him on horseback – and one can see the same in Roman mosaics which show horses running free. Clearly the short Greek mane is an idealized artistic convention, presumably used largely for aesthetic reasons or to give a horse a cultural status. It does not, in itself, help to date the horses.

  Even though it is difficult to relate the horses of St Mark’s to any datable style or breed, one can perhaps find some clues in their individual characteristics. They are strong and sturdy, and this may place them in the Roman era when we know that horses were bred for size and enough was understood about nutrition for chariot or cavalry horses to be fed on high-protein foods. This can only be a tentative suggestion, supported perhaps by the negative argument that horses from the earlier Hellenistic period tend to be more detailed and expressive, as Hellenistic art is in general. If evidence from the manes does not get us far, are there any other stylistic details on the horses which appear at a definable date and are not known earlier? An Italian scholar, Filippo Magi, writing in the early 1970s, made a particularly influential discovery. While many aspects of the horses’ eyes are copied from real horses, one feature is not, and that is a half-moon cut into each eye. The feature seems to have been introduced purely for effect, to create a ‘gleam’ at the top of the cornea. Magi argues that this feature is never known before the second or third centuries AD. There are no other examples of horses with this cut, but the eyes of human figures on Augustus’ Ara Pacis do seem to have been reworked in the early 300s AD by Maxentius, the rival of Constantine in the western empire, with, in this case, concentric circles carved into the irises to create the same sort of effect. Magi went on to examine the horses’ ears, which he considered to be an elegant stylization rather than a representation of an actual horse’s ear. The closest examples in style that he could find came from the second century AD – they are very similar to those on the horses of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, for example.

  This close-up of one of the heads shows the half-moon incision in the eye, which led to Filippo Magi suggesting a date for the horses of the second or third century AD. (1998, Foto Scala, Firenze)

  So far we might edge towards a tentative conclusion that the horses are Roman but in a Greek style (as the manes in particular suggest). Perhaps something more can be learned from the casting itself. We know that the horses were cast by the indirect lost-wax method, which allows copies to be made from existing sculptures. So it is possible that the horses are much later copies of earlier originals. On the other hand, the indirect method can also be used for a one-off casting, as simply the most convenient way of casting a large statue, perhaps from a plaster model made for the occasion. The Riace warriors from fifth-century Delphi, cast by the indirect method, appear to have been made for a specific monument, that celebrating the Athenian victory at Marathon. So the horses may have been cast from an original model made for the purpose, and the use of the indirect method does not in itself help us with dating.

  Can any progress be made from examining the metal in which the horses were cast? The vast majority of figures from the ancient world are cast in bronze. In one study of surviving objects from this period which appeared to be of copper or bronze, those found to be of copper made up only 2 per cent of the total, and there were no examples at all of copper mirrors or armour. As we have seen, it was discovered as early as the eighteenth century that the St Mark’s horses were, in fact, cast in almost pure copper, with lead and tin making up only 2 per cent of the total. A typical percentage of tin in bronze is 10 per cent and sometimes it is as high as 20 per cent. There is a good te
chnical reason why large copper statues are so rare. Copper liquefies at 1,083 degrees Celsius and solidifies again at the same temperature. So, if it is used for casting, it has to be heated to well above 1,083 degrees so that the metal can run into the deeper recesses of a mould before solidifying. The addition of 13 per cent of tin or 25 per cent of lead, or an appropriate mixture of the two, brings the melting point of the alloy down to 1,000 degrees. Furthermore, an alloy of this mix has the property of staying in liquid form until it cools to 800 degrees, making it much easier to fill larger and more detailed moulds. In other words, to cast a large statue in copper is not only more hazardous, because of the higher handling temperatures, but is also a much less efficient method of filling moulds.

  We have only to remember the casting in bronze of the Perseus by Cellini to appreciate just how complex and dangerous a task casting the horses in copper must have been. Studies have shown that each was cast in several pieces, with the legs and heads made as separate castings (the joint between head and body being concealed by the collar) and the tails added separately, and that a large number of ‘gates’, into which the molten metal was poured, was needed. Along the backs of the horses these were only 25 centimetres apart. Examinations of the surface of the horses show that the metal must have cooled quickly and that the greatest number of imperfections were at the entrance to the gates, the areas which received the metal at its hottest. It was just here that cooling made the metal most porous. With imperfections to be smoothed over, joints to be made and the filling holes to be obliterated, the horses needed many patches to make them complete, on average about a hundred per horse. Completing the work must have needed as much time and skill as the actual casting. (Despite their finished look the horses have a mass of small defects, and have received minor patchings-up throughout their history.)