The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Seeking support for this view, Jacoff embarked on some architectural detective work. The placing of the horses on the loggia with a wide gap between the two pairs is unusual and would have made any relationship with a real chariot impossible. Was there a specific reason for leaving a space? In the present setting there does not seem to be, but the window behind the horses was placed there only in the fifteenth century. Before this, according to the Porta San Alipio mosaic, there were columns flanking the horses but what else was in the vicinity is not clear. However, at the Porta dei Fiori on the northern side of St Mark’s there are five reliefs, one each of Christ and the four evangelists, which date from the thirteenth century. It has long been acknowledged that they are out of place there and were probably transferred from somewhere else in the church. They could actually fit in the space above the horses, with the relief of Christ in the centre just under the arch and the evangelists set out below him above the columns which flank the horses themselves. It may be significant that the evangelists are set in two pairs, Luke and Mark, Matthew and John, with the members of each pair facing one another. Mark is given the most prominent position, on the immediate right hand of Christ, as, understandably, he is in other representations in ‘his’ basilica. He is designed to face outwards from Christ and towards his partner, Luke, who faces back at him. Conventionally – in ancient art, for instance – the inner horses in a quadriga face towards each other and the outer two away from each other. Here on St Mark’s, the heads of each pair of horses face each other, just as the evangelists behind them would have done. As we have seen, the heads of the horses could have been detached and changed around to make this possible.

  In short, Jacoff suggests that the whole façade was designed as a unity in the thirteenth century, with the positioning of the horses designed to echo the reliefs behind them. The mosaics of the façade recorded the legends, such as the dream, which link Mark to Venice, while the horses and the reliefs placed behind and above them set Mark within the context of universal Christianity. The whole is a triumphant assertion of Venice’s status, as a conqueror whose temporal victories can be integrated with the patronage of its saint. The horses stand not only as symbols of victory but also as symbols of Mark. They are transformed within a new Christian context, just as in the Piazzetta other ancient bronzes were transformed into the statues of Theodore and Mark. (These reliefs, some the originals, some resin copies, have now been placed alongside the horses in St Mark’s.)

  This carefully composed design was shattered when the decision was made in the 1420s to replace the reliefs with the large expanse of glass which fills the space today. Presumably the driving force was the demand for more light within the basilica. Three other windows, one in the north side and two in the south, were inserted into the walls of St Mark’s in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the western façade, open to the daylight from the Piazza, was the obvious one to exploit if yet more light were needed. This may appear to have been a ruthless destruction of both the aesthetic whole of the original and its spiritual significance, but the continual replanning of St Mark’s over the centuries shows that the Venetians were certainly not sentimental about such things. (A major ‘restoration’ of St Mark’s in the 1860s was so destructive of earlier mosaics and sculpture that an international campaign led by John Ruskin was launched in protest, and luckily succeeded in halting the project before it had reached the western façade.) Even so, there may have been some unease over removing the images of the evangelists. Two smaller representations of the four saints, one in the curve of the arch over the window, appear to have been entered on the façade at the time the window was put in, perhaps as a compensation for what had been lost.

  Jacoff’s argument is compelling; but would the bold display of the horses from Constantinople, even in so explicit a Christian context, ever have appeared to observers as other than primarily a triumphant display of plunder? Certainly the religious justification for the placing of the horses does not seem to have convinced everyone. We have fascinating evidence of how one of Venice’s rivals, the city of Padua on the mainland, perceived the setting of the horses in the early fourteenth century. Here the Florentine artist Giotto was fulfilling a commission to decorate the Arena Chapel (so called because it was built within the walls of the original Roman arena) for a wealthy Paduan merchant, Enrico Scrovegni. His theme was episodes from the life of the Virgin and of Christ. The Arena frescos are seen as the moment when Italian painting turned from Greek to Latin, in particular to a more realistic way of recording emotion and the natural world, and rank among the masterpieces of the early Renaissance. It has long been recognized that Giotto preferred to copy real buildings rather than to reproduce the traditional stylized images used in Byzantine art, and this is what he did when he came to depicting the Temple in Jerusalem for the fresco of The Expulsion from the Temple. One of his fellow craftsmen was the sculptor Giovanni Pisano, who had recently worked on Siena Cathedral, and it was this façade, with its pointed arches, that Giotto copied for the Temple. The original, still standing in Siena, has six sculptured animals on the pillars between the arches: two horses, one at either end; two lions in the centre; and, between the lions and the horses, an ox and a griffin. However, Giotto omits the ox and the griffin and changes over the lions with the horses so that the lions are on the outside. Then he executes a further transformation. The inner horses are none other than copies of those of St Mark’s!

  Of course, Giotto may simply have been copying the horses because they were works of art which he had seen and admired. Yet if The Expulsion is explored alongside the New Testament texts that describe it, something very interesting emerges about the way Giotto portrays it. The gospels of Matthew and Mark both describe the expulsion of the money-changers and the sellers of pigeons (which were bought for sacrifice). John (2: 13–16) adds to this sellers of cattle and sheep, who are expelled by Jesus along with their animals. In Giotto’s version the only sign of the moneychangers is an upturned table, but he does include an ox and a sheep.

  Clearly Giotto has used John’s version as his text. It seems that he was being tactful. The fortune of the Scrovegni family came from usury – Enrico’s father Reginald was so notorious for the practice that he is to be found in hell in Dante’s Inferno – and it has been suggested that the Arena Chapel was commissioned by Enrico in the hope of distancing himself from this unhealthy ancestry. Thus there was every good reason for Giotto to concentrate on the sheep and cattle and avoid any emphatic reference to the moneychangers. But how would this affect the animals shown on the façade of the Temple? To answer this question one has to go back to an Old Testament text, 2 Kings 23: 11. Here King Josiah is described as destroying the idols which have crept into the Temple of Jerusalem. ‘He did away with the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun at the entrance of the Temple … and he burned the chariot of the sun.’ Christ was carrying out a similar cleansing of the same Temple, and Giotto has strengthened his point by portraying two horses to remind onlookers that they had been symbols of idolatry just as the sheep and cattle were in Jesus’ time. By portraying the horses of St Mark’s, was Giotto making the subtle point that they were emblems of pagan idolatry, and that their display had more to do with irreligious pride than with piety? This is certainly how the grand refashioning of the façade of St Mark’s with looted treasure might have seemed to Venice’s enemies.

  In his The Expulsion from the Temple in the Arena Chapel in Padua (1305), Giotto displays two horses of St Mark’s, one either side of the central arch of the Temple. Was he making the point that the independent Paduans saw them as symbols of idolatry? (1990, Foto Scala, Firenze)

  8

  DOGE OR EMPEROR? THE HORSES, HIPPODROMES AND IMPERIAL DISPLAY

  THE IMMEDIATE CHALLENGE FOR THE DOGES AFTER 1204 was to establish control over their new empire. In Constantinople itself the authority exercised in the city by Enrico Dandolo in the months before his death was passed through
election to one Marino Zeno, who arrogantly announced that he was ‘lord of a quarter plus half a quarter of the Roman empire’ and took on the title of podestà (the word means ‘one who holds power’; often, in Italian cities, an elected chief magistrate). There was even talk of moving the capital of the Venetian empire to Constantinople. These ambitions were quashed by the emergence of a tough doge, Pietro Ziani (r. 1205–29), who moved quickly to reassert his own authority in Venice. He made it clear that the lands acquired by Enrico Dandolo from the Byzantine empire, certainly those close to Venice, were under his direct control, not that of the podestà, and that Venetians could take over the newly acquired territories without reference to the podestà. Ziani then further announced that it was he, not Zeno, who was the lord of the Roman empire. In 1207 Zeno was replaced by a podestà sent out from Venice and this became the usual procedure. Not that the podestàe were without power. One of them, Giacomo Tiepolo, even exploited the weakness of the Latin emperor of his time in order to make his own treaties with surrounding states and then used a second term as podestà (1224–9) as a stepping stone to the office of doge.

  Once the doges had asserted their status as ‘lord of a quarter plus half a quarter of the Roman empire’ we find them linking themselves back to the Byzantine imperial past, even to the heyday of Rome. Pietro Ziani, the doge who had stamped his authority on the podestà, was praised on his tomb as ‘rich, honest, patient and in all things straightforward. None could be his equal amongst the high-born and wise. Not even Caesar and Vespasian when they were alive.’ Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul in the first century BC and later dictator of Rome, needs no introduction. The emperor Vespasian (r. AD 69–79) had restored order to the empire after the reign of Nero and commissioned the building of the Colosseum. Conquest, stability, building: these were the ‘Roman’ attributes of Ziani. It was in his reign that work to finalize the form of the Piazza San Marco and complete the transformation of the façade of St Mark’s, described earlier, was begun.

  Ziani’s claim that the doges had supplanted the emperors may be seen reflected in his embellishment of the Palo d’Oro, one of the great treasures of St Mark’s. The Palo d’Oro is an altar screen which had been commissioned by an earlier doge, Ordelafo Falier (r. 1101–18), from workshops in Constantinople. As originally made, it had three central panels on which portraits of Alexius I, the emperor of the time, and his wife Eirene, flanked the Virgin Mary at prayer, a standard Byzantine image. In this form it was installed by the altar in St Mark’s. In other words, the supremacy of the Byzantine emperor was, in the early twelfth century, still being respected in the doge’s own chapel in Venice. When a mass of jewels and enamels arrived back in Venice among the treasures of the sack of 1204, it was decided to fit them into the Palo d’Oro. Ziani asked the procurator of St Mark’s, one Angelo Falier, who was a descendant of Doge Ordelafo, to oversee the task, and Falier was arrogant enough to discard the portrait of Alexius I and replace it with one of his ancestor – while retaining all the imperial regalia that had been shown on the original! In effect, a doge, albeit in this case one long dead, was transformed into a Byzantine emperor.

  It was only a matter of time before the same transformation was effected of a living doge, and sure enough this occurred in 1284, when Venice decided to mint its own gold ducats. On these the doge – another Dandolo, Giovanni – was shown on the coin receiving an imperial banner just as the emperor was on Byzantine coins. By this period the doge also dressed himself in a costume which drew on Byzantine precedents, notably red stockings, black shoes encrusted in diamonds and a fur-lined mantle.

  As we have seen, the coronation rites of the Byzantine emperors stressed that they were the favoured of God, who, the fiction went, had chosen the emperor as his representative on earth. We find Enrico Dandolo making the same claim for himself. One chronicle records his words: ‘And God through his mercy and divine grace illuminates the mind of each doge, chief and rector of Venice, so that his state may always grow and expand [God had done Dandolo proud in this respect!], and so that each may accordingly support and govern and preserve his state.’ Martino da Canal reproduces the acclamation with which the doge, in this case Reniero Zeno (r. 1253–68), was met in St Mark’s when he entered on a feast day: ‘Let Christ be victorious, let Christ rule, let Christ reign; to our Lord Reniero Zeno, by the grace of God illustrious Doge of Venice, Dalmatia and Croatia, conqueror of a fourth part and half a fourth part of all the Roman empire, salvation, honour, life and victory, let Christ be victorious, let Christ rule, let Christ reign.’ This can be compared to the acclamation with which the Byzantine emperor Leo I was greeted on his succession in 457: ‘Give ear, oh God, we call on you. Hear us, oh God. To Leo, life. Give ear, oh God. Leo shall rule. Oh God who loves mankind, the common people ask for Leo as emperor, the army asks for Leo as emperor … Let Leo come, he, the ornament of all, Leo shall rule, he, the good of all. Give ear, oh Lord, we call on you.’ In both cases the acclamation begins and ends with acknowledgement of God or Christ, with specific epithets applied to the emperor in between. In Constantinople the emperors had signified their place as representative of Christ by carrying a white paschal candle in the Easter procession. According to Martino da Canal, the doges adopted the same practice for the Easter procession in Piazza San Marco.

  If one looks at the burial places of Dandolo’s successors one can see how they developed their ‘divine’ status. As Debra Pincus has shown in her study of the tombs of the doges, the creation of an opulent tomb became a prominent feature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their decoration includes echoes of the Byzantine emperors’ burial monuments. The tomb of Doge Giacomo Tiepolo, the former podestà, survives on the outside wall of the grand Dominican Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. The lid, apparently from an original sarcophagus of the fifth century, is crafted in a style associated with Ravenna, to where the last of the western Roman emperors withdrew their court in the fifth century. Prominent on it is a jewelled cross which stands on steps. The emperor Theodosius (AD 379–95) had placed a similar cross on the site of the crucifixion in Jerusalem, and it is a type found on Byzantine coins. So the cross here is a symbol not just of Christianity but of the Christian emperor. Tiepolo’s successors, Doge Marino Morosini (d. 1253) and doge Reniero Zeno (d. 1268), were also buried in antique tombs, ‘which encase the body of the doge in images of Christ as ruler’, as Debra Pincus puts it. Pincus has also shown how the frontal reliefs of Morosini’s tomb, believed to be contemporary with his death, appear to have been influenced by those on one of the most prestigious of all Roman monuments, the triumphal Arch of Constantine in Rome. Another feature of these doges’ reigns which enhanced their ‘imperial’ status was the formation of marriage alliances between their families and neighbouring royal families: the family of Pietro Ziani with the king of Sicily, that of Giacomo Tiepolo with the king of Rascia in the Balkans, and that of Marino Morosini with the kings of Hungary.

  Of course, the most prestigious burial place had to be St Mark’s. Marino Morosini was the first doge to be buried there, but his tomb was in the atrium, the colonnade at the entrance: not a very privileged area. Doge Giovanni Soranzo (r. 1312–28) was given a much more prominent position, in the baptistery. At the time there was an entrance to the basilica here from the Piazzetta, so the tomb would have been seen by anyone entering by this door. It was (and remains) a particularly fine tomb of coloured marble, set in a wall of marble slabs. Doge Andrea Dandolo (r. 1342–54) attempted to go even further. As a procurator of the basilica he had directed restoration work on the interior, and it was he who, in his capacity as procurator, had allowed Soranzo’s tomb to be placed in the baptistery. When doge himself, he added a great crucifixion mosaic above the baptistery altar; he also built a new chapel, San Isidore, and remounted the Palo d’Oro in even greater splendour – in the form in which it survives today. He had hoped that his benefactions would be sufficient to earn him a burial place in the chapel of St John the
Evangelist, close to the central dome of the basilica – but his ambitions had risen too far. After his death the procurators refused his request and his body ended up, like Soranzo’s, in the baptistery.

  So, in the Venice of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries we find the doges consciously associating themselves both with symbols of Byzantine imperial power and directly with the divine, as the emperors had. They also took trouble to show themselves off to their subjects – and where better to do so than the loggia of St Mark’s? There is a description of the scene at the election of doge Reniero Zeno in 1253 in Martino da Canal’s Estoires de Venise, with the newly elected doge and his entourage of nobles standing on the loggia and his subjects taking part in a brightly coloured parade below.

  We know, too, that in the thirteenth century the coronation ceremony included a presentation of the doge to the people with the words: ‘This is your doge if he pleases you’ – a procedure reminiscent of imperial coronations in Constantinople – and this again presumably took place on the loggia. Indeed, Canal goes on to describe the processions which ‘Monsignor the Doge makes upon high festivals’, and these always end with a mass after which the doge shows himself to the people from the loggia.

  From 1364 we have a much more explicit description of the doge acting in a ceremonial role on the loggia. It comes in a letter written by Petrarch, the greatest scholar of his age, who that year had been welcomed to Venice and given a house there. This letter is also important in providing the first description of the horses in situ. Petrarch is up on the loggia beside them with the doge – he was actually given the most honoured position on the ruler’s right (the position given to Mark in relation to Christ in the mosaics that had once been behind the loggia). He writes: