The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  His immediate problem was that the Acropolis was covered with a mass of later buildings. The Parthenon itself had been transformed first into a Christian church and then, after the fall of Athens to the Turks in 1456, into a mosque. (It was only in the nineteenth century that the later accretions were cleared away to create the ‘pure’ fifth-century BC Acropolis in shining white marble that we see today.) Fra Urbino even fails to recognize the site as Greek. This is what he says:

  And on the summit of the mountain the fortress is built, and there is a very strong castle and ancient walls with square stones … and in the castle there is a church [i.e. the Parthenon] that was once an ancient temple of the Romans [sic], most admirable and all of marble with columns around … and on the façade in front are an infinite number of images of marble in relief … And there is also in the castle a most noble ancient palace near the church, and it is all of marble, built alla romana …

  When such confusion of Greek with Roman was commonplace, it is no wonder that the attributions of the horses could be little more than guesswork.

  It is almost impossible to grasp today how difficult it was four hundred years ago to get accurate drawings or images against which statues could be compared. There was a natural tendency for draughtsmen to view images through the conventions of their time. The earliest known drawing of the Parthenon, by Cyriacus of Ancona (of what was then still a church), was inaccurate in that he represented an Athena clad in a Renaissance gown instead of the original classical chiton, and transformed the figures on the west pediment into Renaissance putti. Even the angle of the pediment was set much too high. A later artist, Giuliano da Sangallo (c.1510), worked from Cyriacus’ inaccurate drawing of the pediment but drew the columns of a Roman temple below it so that some came to believe that the Parthenon had been rebuilt by the Romans (an idea already promulgated by Fra Urbino, who had seen the real thing). The seventeenth-century drawings of Jacques Carrey, famous because they show reliefs which were later destroyed when the Parthenon was blown up by a Venetian shell in 1687, made the sculpted figures look much more exuberant than they really were.

  None of these drawings were printed (the first printed drawing of the Parthenon was published only in the eighteenth century) and few people were able to visit Athens, now a backwater of the Ottoman empire; so there was, in effect, no reliable representation of Phidias’ work available. As far as identification of the sculptures of the Parthenon was concerned, things were made worse by the failure to realize that the original entrance to the temple was from the east, not the west, the end one first comes to on ascending the Acropolis and which, even today, one can all too easily assume to be the original front of the temple. It was not until 1762 that the correct entrance was identified by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in their Antiquities of Athens. The second-century AD Greek traveller Pausanias had described the scenes on the pediments as they stood in his time, but because of the mix-up over which end was the front his description of the pediment over the entrance was applied to the pediment at the back (western end) of the Parthenon and vice versa! Although Cyriacus associated the sculptures of the Parthenon with Phidias, later visitors failed to grasp that all the reliefs were from the fifth century BC; as we have seen, some, knowing that the emperor Hadrian had carried out a major building programme in Athens, thought they were Roman.

  In short, it would have been impossible in the sixteenth century to have made any comparison between the horses of St Mark’s and the original works of Phidias, if, indeed, the sculptures of the Parthenon are his.* All these attributions were guesswork. Pliny had, in any case, specifically linked several other sculptors with quadrigae – not only Lysippus but a Calamis, a Euphranor and a Pyromachus who had sculpted the Athenian Alcibiades, victor in the Olympic Games of 416. All that could be said was that quadrigae were common in the ancient world; without any evidence on the horses themselves of their makers, it was impossible to go further.

  11

  THE IDEAL HORSE?

  The artists of the Veneto, within the narrow confines of their drawings, portray the forms of beautiful antique figures in marble and sometimes bronze which are lying around or are preserved and treasured publicly and in private, and the arches, baths, theatres and various other buildings which still stand in certain places there; then when they plan to execute some new work, they examine these models, and, seeking to produce likenesses of them with artifice, they believe their labours will earn them the more praise the more nearly they manage to make their work resemble the ancient ones; so they work, aware that the ancient objects approach the perfection of art more closely than do those of more recent times.

  Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), who wrote this passage in 1525, was one of those complex characters who make the study of Renaissance intellectual life so interesting. A native of Venice and son of one of its leading nobles, he wavered between religious and secular life, managing to become a cardinal despite fathering three children with one Moresina, the great love of his life. He travelled widely from one Italian court to the next, and even had a spell as secretary to the pope. He could read Latin and Greek, and was seen as one of the finest Latin stylists of his time; but he also rejoiced in writing love lyrics in Italian, though his enthusiasm for the vernacular tongue (he championed the Tuscan Italian of the fifteenth century) damaged his status as a scholar among more austere intellectuals. He was an associate of Aldus, the Venetian printer, and was responsible for creating critical editions of the Roman poets Virgil and Horace, as well as Petrarch and the great Dante. Immensely rich by the time he reached fifty, he retired to a villa near Padua which he filled with both antiques and the works of the finest artists of his day, among them Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini and Raphael. He even wrote a history of Venice, some of which was censored by the Senate when it described the characters of prominent Venetians he had known rather too perceptively.

  Bembo’s comments on antique art echo those of Pliny the Elder. The antique becomes an object of admiration in its own right simply because it is a representative of the age in which art was perfected. Even something so apparently mundane as Roman pottery aroused the same adulation as the finest Greek sculpture. As early as 1282 one Ristoro of Arezzo, newly aware of discoveries of Roman ware from his native city, captured the mood of excitement.

  The cognoscenti, when they found ancient Aretine vases, they rejoiced and shouted to one another with the greatest delight, and they got loud and nearly lost their senses and became quite silly: and the ignorant wanted to throw the vases and break them up. When some of these pieces got into the hands of sculptors and painters or other cognoscenti, they preserved them like holy relics, marvelling that human nature could reach so high.

  This treatment of antique objects as sacred relics reached a bizarre climax in 1413 when some bones were found in a lead sarcophagus in a graveyard in Padua. Somehow they were assumed to be those of none other than the great Roman historian Livy, who was born and died in the city, and immediately intellectuals and sightseers flocked to the scene as if it were the shrine of a saint. Despite the attempts of an enthusiastic monk to break up the bones of this pagan, they were carried off into the city in procession and placed in a casket over an entrance-way to the city’s Palazzo della Raggione, the vast thirteenth-century meeting hall. The spiritual boundary between Christianity and paganism dissolved in this outburst of fervour.

  If ancient art has reached perfection, then perhaps the Renaissance artist should attempt to imitate it. In a treatise on painting, the Dialogo della Pittura (1557) by the Venetian Ludoviso Dolce, an imaginary dialogue is constructed between Pietro Aretino, connoisseur, collector and champion of the Venetian Titian, who had died in Venice in 1556, and one Fabrini, who argues for the supremacy of the Florentine Michelangelo over Titian. Aretino expounds his view of ancient sculpture.

  One should also imitate the lovely marble or bronze works by the ancient masters. Indeed, the man who savours their incredible perfection and fully makes it his own wi
ll confidently be able to correct many defects in nature itself and make his paintings noteworthy and pleasing to everyone, for antique objects embody complete artistic perfection and may serve as exemplars for the whole of beauty.

  This approach is that of the Greek philosopher Plato, who became highly influential in the fifteenth century, notably through the works of the Florentine Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). Ficino had been installed by the great patron Cosimo de’ Medici in a Medici villa outside Florence with a mass of Greek manuscripts, and from them he compiled the first complete translation of Plato in Latin. Plato, writing in the fourth century BC, had argued that many qualities, including beauty, existed on an eternal plane in Forms or Ideas which contained the essence of the quality. No object of beauty in the natural world could equal the perfection of the Form of Beauty, although it might provide an imitation of it. Pliny, in his Natural History, had given his own example from the ancient world. One of his ‘great’ Greek painters, Zeuxis, was commissioned by the city of Croton (in Italy) to paint a Helen, a woman so beautiful that that Trojan War had been fought over her. Zeuxis selected five local girls and posed them in the nude. Of course, none of them was perfect; but he selected the best parts of each, brought them together and in his painting created the most beautiful woman he could. For Plato such a ‘beautiful woman’ might give the earthly observer a glimpse of what the Form of Beauty might be like, but, as with any object in the material world, it would always fall short of the ideal. In the Platonic tradition the artist had to labour, as Zeuxis had done, to come as close as it was possible on earth to reach the Form. This approach stood in sharp contrast to another view of the artistic mission that was also popular in the fifteenth century: that the task of the artist was to portray the natural world as it existed before his eyes. In the Platonic view the artist could, on the contrary, liberate himself from slavish copying and use his imagination to create an ideal against which any object in the natural world would seem defective.

  Many Platonists believed that underlying ‘the ideal’ was a geometrical proportion: in a sculpture of a human body, for example, a canon of ideal relationships between different parts of the body. This view derived from Greece, even, in fact, before the time of Plato. A fifth-century BC sculptor from the Greek city of Argos, Polyclitus, had even written a book, the Canon, now lost, setting out the correct proportions in mathematical terms. ‘Perfection is the step-by-step product of many numbers,’ he had stated. With the rediscovery of classical writers in the Renaissance, this idea had been resurrected for architecture by the brilliant Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti. In his enormously influential The Art of Building, compiled in the 1440s and 1450s, Alberti argued for the existence of ideal proportions, setting out theorems that express the required geometrical ratios. We know that The Art of Building made its impact in Venice because the Torre dell’Orologio, the clock tower in the Piazza San Marco that was constructed in the late fifteenth century, conformed to Alberti’s recommended proportions for towers in its 1:4 ratio of width to height and its placing ‘at a point where a road meets a square or a forum’. In Venetian art the Platonic approach may be seen in Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus of 1510, a painting in which Venus’ sensuality appears elevated beyond the material world of desire. The dreamy landscapes and Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini convey the same Platonic sense of eternal perfection.

  The horses of St Mark’s could hardly escape being caught up in the enthusiasm for ideals. They were seen as items of quality simply because of their age and provenance; but also, in so far as it was believed that the ancients were imbued with Platonism, they could also be revered as examples of the ideal horse. Moreover, if the artists in the Veneto area were looking for exemplars, there were simply no other standing horses from antiquity to copy from. If one finds a drawing, by an artist of the period who has worked or lived in Venice, of a horse standing on three legs with one foreleg raised, it is likely that it has been modelled on the St Mark’s horses. Take the Florentine artist Paolo Uccello, who had lived and worked in Venice between 1425 and 1430 and who is credited with a mosaic of St Peter, now lost, that was positioned on the top left-hand corner of the façade of the basilica, not far from the horses. We can assume that he must have observed them in detail. When he returned to his native Florence, Uccello was commissioned to paint a fresco in Florence’s cathedral in memory of Sir John Hawkwood, an Englishman who had successfully led Florence’s troops over a period of eighteen years. By chance Uccello’s original drawing survives, and it shows how much he was taken with ‘ideal’ perspectives. It is one of the earliest drawings to be made on squared paper, and much of the design is geometrical, as Polyclitus would have recommended. The top of the horse’s rump is the arc of a circle, for instance. The horse itself is modelled on one of the St Mark’s horses in so far as it has the front right foot lifted and the rear right foot well in advance (in fact further in advance than that in the St Mark’s model). Uccello is trying to dignify his horse by drawing on classical models but at the same time trying to create an ideal horse. His patrons seemed not to have approved as the fresco itself is much more natural, the rump of Sir John’s horse flat in comparison to the sketch. The link to antiquity was nevertheless preserved by painting the horse in a brownish green which suggests bronze, seen at this time as the most prestigious of ancient materials.

  The first Venetian artist to incorporate the principles of the Florentine Renaissance into Venetian art was Jacopo Bellini, father of the painters Gentile and Giovanni. His contemporaries saw him as reviving the standards and proportions of ancient art. ‘How you may exult, Bellino, that what your lucid intellect feels your industrious hand shapes into rich and unusual form. So that to all others you teach the true way of the divine Apelles and the noble Polycleitus,’ as one sonnet by a contemporary put it. Two albums survive of his drawings, which he seems to have treasured and on which he worked for forty years (c.1430–70). His subject matter reflects a mixture of Christian themes (the trial and crucifixion of Christ; St George and the dragon) and those of Roman antiquity. Some show horses, in all kinds of poses, some ridden, some not, and many of these are reminiscent of those on St Mark’s in their stance or the way they hold their head. It seems indubitable that Bellini knew the horses well and used them as an ideal, adapting them as necessary in his drawings.

  One subject which required a standing horse was that of St Martin giving his cloak to a beggar. The story goes that the fourth-century Martin, who came from Hungary, then part of the Roman empire, met a beggar and cut his cloak in half to share with him. Martin was not yet a Christian but then had a vision of Christ wearing the complete cloak, and it was this which led to his conversion. It was a popular story in medieval times and a favourite among artists. A Venetian artist looking for a model of a standing horse for a depiction of St Martin and the beggar would find one in the horses of St Mark’s. In a polyptych by Paolo Veneziano (fl. 1320–60 and the earliest Venetian painter whose work is distinguishable from others’) in the Church of San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna, Martin’s horse is indeed standing with a foreleg slightly raised, although his head is lowered, unlike those of the horses on St Mark’s. A hundred years later Martin, his horse and the beggar are found on a panel of a polyptych by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio (1465–1526) in the Cathedral of St Anastasia in what was then the Venetian subject city of Zara (now Zadar in Croatia). This horse, seen from the front with its head turned towards the beggar, has a real feel of a St Mark’s horse. Perhaps, too, one can see a likeness to the St Mark’s horses in Carpaccio’s The Crucifixion of the Ten Thousand Martyrs on Mount Ararat, now in the Accademia in Venice. There are a number of horses in the picture of which four, each with a rider, stand together in the middle foreground; the one on the left in particular seems inspired by those on St Mark’s.

  In the notebooks of Jacopo Bellini (compiled 1430–70) there are many representations of horses which are clearly modelled on those of St Mark’s. The horses would have been
the only full-size examples of ancient horses available for a Venetian artist. (Museés Nationaux, Photo RMN–Gérard Blot)

  The horses of St Mark’s provided a model for many Venetian artists. Here Paolo Veneziano (active 1320–60) uses one to portray the famous legend of St Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar. (The Church of San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna.) (S. Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna/Scala)

  A further possible echo of the St Mark’s horses can be found in the work of the German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Dürer, who was already known beyond his homeland for his woodcuts and engravings, spent some time in Venice in the early sixteenth century, and was a favourite in aristocratic circles, though his position was never secure: awarded commissions in the city, he aroused the envy and scorn of the local artists, who several times tried to call him before the magistrates for trespassing on the preserve of the city’s guild of artists. The horse in his engraving The Knight, Death and the Devil is considered by some to have been fashioned after those of St Mark’s – but this must remain a tentative suggestion only, for by 1513, when the engraving was made, Venetians had another impressive bronze horse to use as a model: that sculpted by Andrea del Verrocchio in his equestrian statue of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, erected in the Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice in 1496. Certainly by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the St Mark’s horses seem to disappear from paintings and drawings – except, of course, those, like Gentile Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza San Marco of 1496, where the horses provided the backdrop to the procession.