The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  In fact, we can see a shift in emphasis around this time: now the horses are no longer viewed just as ideals for artists to copy but as tourist attractions. By the sixteenth century the horses begin to be cited in guides to the city as a ‘must-see’ for visitors. One Venetian, Anton Francesco Doni, compiled a list of the treasures of the city in 1549. They include works by Giorgione, Titian and Dürer, but heading the list is none other than ‘the four divine horses’. Francesco Sansovino, in his exploration of the ‘most noble and singular city of Venice’ (1581), stresses their perfection, describing them as ‘four antique horses of such rarity that even to this day they have no equal in any part of the world’. In his earlier short guide to ‘the remarkable things of the city of Venice’, produced in 1561, Sansovino had created a dialogue between a Venetian, Veneziano, and a visitor to the city, Forestiero. They enter the Piazza San Marco and gaze up at the horses:

  St Martin appears again in this panel by Vittore Carpaccio (1465–1526) to be found in the cathedral at Zadar. The horses were ideal models for those who needed to show a horse standing. (Alinari Archives, Florence)

  Veneziano: … It is true that they are difficult to appreciate at that height, but up there they do not obstruct the Piazza and are out of the way of the people.

  Forestiero: I confess to you that truly the Cavallo of the Campidoglio in Rome is of less beauty than these, though it is larger, and that of SS. Giovanni e Paolo is not to be compared with them.

  Now that travel around Italy was easier, the horses of St Mark’s began to be compared with other bronze horses. The ‘Cavallo of the Campidoglio’, the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius which dated from the reign of the emperor itself (AD 161–80) was certainly a worthy rival. It seems to have spent all its life in Rome. When it first emerges in sources from the middle ages it is found in front of the cathedral of St John Lateran in the south of the city, and was believed then to be of the Christian emperor Constantine who had founded the cathedral in the early fourth century. This almost certainly explains why it was never melted down in the cataclysmic destruction of pagan art which accompanied the ‘triumph’ of Christianity. By the end of the middle ages, this attribution had been challenged, and a wide variety of Roman heroes and emperors, including Hadrian, were suggested instead as its subject; but when Michelangelo transferred the statue to the Capitoline Hill (the Campidoglio) to serve as the centrepiece of his new Piazza in 1538, the horseman’s identity was still unknown, and so the statue came to be known simply as Cavallo, ‘the horse’. (The attribution to the emperor Marcus Aurelius was fully accepted about 1600.) None of this uncertainty affected the admiration of the statue. It is the model for the earliest known Renaissance reproduction of an antique statue in bronze, by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Averlino (normally known as Filarete, from the Greek, ‘lover of virtue’), possibly made in the 1430s, and more engravings were made in the sixteenth century of the Cavallo than of any other ancient sculpture. A legend records that Michelangelo was so moved by the horse that he asked it to step forward. ‘Don’t you know that you are alive?’ he challenged it. It was even said that the end of the world would be announced through its mouth.

  The famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, one of the most influential statues of antiquity and an inspiration for sculptors from the fifteenth century onwards. (Piazza del Campidoglio, Roma/Scala)

  This was an ancient statue, so was revered for its own sake; but now the Venetians had a contemporary bronze equestrian statue in the centre of their own city, Verrocchio’s monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni. To honour a military hero by presenting him on horseback was a practice with the most ancient and respectable of precedents, as the bronze of Marcus Aurelius makes abundantly clear. In the fifteenth century we find equestrian statues appearing on the tombs of Venetians as they begin to construct a Roman past for themselves. The earliest example is the monument commemorating Paolo Savelli in the Church of Santa Maria dei Frari. Here again is a horse which might be said to have been modelled on one of those on St Mark’s. The right foreleg is lifted, the head is turned slightly and although there is a full mane, in contrast to the cropped manes of the horses on the basilica, the tail is tied with a knot in the same way. Verrocchio, however, was a Florentine and looked elsewhere for his influences. According to Vasari’s sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists, Verrocchio was deeply impressed by the Marcus Aurelius, but he would also have been aware of another great bronze equestrian statue from recent times, that created by his fellow Florentine, Donatello, of the Venetian condottiere Erasmo da Narni, always known by his nom de guerre Gattalamata, ‘the calico cat’. The statue, commissioned by the Venetian Senate, was placed in front of the basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua (where it still stands) in 1453. Donatello seems to have been determined to use the statue to dominate the square – the horse and its rider are monumental.

  Bartolomeo Colleoni, the subject of Verrocchio’s statue, was a highly successful general, a pioneer, in fact, of the use of field artillery, who despite being from the mainland city of Bergamo had been made leader of Venetian troops fighting in mainland Italy in the 1460s. On his death in 1475 he left a large sum of money for a statue of himself to be erected in Piazza San Marco. The city baulked at the request but the Signoria saved its embarrassment by announcing instead that the statue would be erected in front of the building which housed the Confraternity of St Mark, next to the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.

  Verrocchio did Colleoni proud. The condottiere is shown riding his great charger into battle, a look of absolute determination and concentrated aggression on his face. Verrocchio died before his clay model was cast and even though the Venetian bronze-worker Alessandro Leopardi, who completed it, toned down some of its exuberance, it still overwhelms the visitor from its high pedestal. It outclasses the Donatello by its emotional power and was certainly the most famous equestrian statue of the Renaissance – even if the Venetians unscrupulously played down the Florentine Verrocchio’s achievement by giving the credit to their own Leopardi, whose name appears on the girth!

  So when Forestiero preferred the horses of St Mark’s to the Marcus Aurelius and the Colleoni monument, he could hardly have paid them a greater compliment. Nevertheless, in one respect they might be considered inferior: in their display. As Veneziano had said, they were difficult to appreciate where they were – they were much too high up. A direct contrast could be made with the Marcus Aurelius, which Michelangelo deliberately planned to be the focal point of his Capitoline Hill. In 1561 it was set up in the centre of the square on a marble base, parts of which were taken from the nearby forum of the Emperor Trajan. As for the Colleoni monument, the tall pedestal on which it stood was the original work of Leopardi and was Roman in style. Its variegated sheets of marble were encased in columns and were embellished with tablets displaying trophies. It allowed Colleoni to be seen from all sides. Venetians were well aware of the limitations of the horses’ position. In 1558 Enea Vico suggested that they should be placed on a high pedestal like the one on which the Colleoni statue stood, but, unlike that statue, they should be placed in the square itself. He writes of ‘the noble quadriga of four extremely beautiful and undamaged horses, set over the main entrance to the temple of San Marco, a very rare work which both in art and all else is a very stupendous thing, and marvellous and perhaps the most beautiful in all Europe’. However,

  The monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni in the Campo of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice (1486) was an extraordinarily powerful sculpture which echoed the Marcus Aurelius, but many Venetians still preferred the horses of St Mark’s. (Campo S. Zanipolo, Venezia/Scala)

  being against some large windows of dark glass, they are so greatly deprived of their viewpoint that they are not given that great consideration which such great art and such creations of beauty should merit. From which it seems to me that their dignity requires a very prominent high base of beautiful marble to be set between the flag-poles in the great Piazza [another creati
on of Leopardi’s still in place today], or at the other end of the Piazza opposite to the church [he means the Church of San Geminiano, which was to be demolished by Napoleon]; this might be so majestic and confining that it would be hard to see the feet of the horses, but unimpeded by the height of the pedestal, outlined against the sky, they would appear grander to the sight of onlookers.

  Vico’s idea was greeted with some sympathy and, although it was never acted on, in the eighteenth century the painter Canaletto actually created a capriccio in which the horses are placed down in the square, as Vico had suggested, but in Canaletto’s version on separate pedestals.

  In the sixteenth century, it was suggested that the horses should be placed on pedestals in the square so they could be better seen. It was never done, but in this capriccio by Canaletto (1697–1768) he imagines how they might have looked. (The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)

  It was, of course, possible to ‘display’ the horses by reproducing them in miniature. In the fifteenth century the ordinary collector was still able to pick up original antique statues. Jacopo Bellini is known to have had several and one, a Venus from Paphos in Cyprus, where Aphrodite was said to have been born in the sea, attributed to Praxiteles, was passed on to his son Gentile. It could be seen, by those interested, on a shelf in his studio in Venice. By the sixteenth century, however, only the wealthiest collector could afford original antiques and had to make do, as second best, with the work of contemporaries. Not that these were without quality. As Sabba di Castiglione (1485–1554) put it in a book of moral reflections published in Venice in 1546, ‘the Venetians decorate their houses with antiques, such as heads, torsos, busts, ancient marble or bronze statues. But since good ancient works, being scarce, cannot be obtained without the greatest difficulty, they decorate them with the works of Donatello or with the works of Michelangelo.’ The scarcity of originals led to a new market in small bronzes. Bronze always carried with it an aura of quality and antiquity, and a survey of the most common subjects shows that bronzes representing themes from classical mythology were more popular than those of Christian subjects. Animals or personifications of ideals, in particular, were much sought after. The major ‘Venetian’ centre for production in the late fifteenth century was Padua, though bronzes were also cast in Venice itself.

  One of the attractions of small bronzes was that they could be kept for study or enjoyment in a domestic setting, and just such a setting is to be found in one of the most exquisite works of the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio, The Vision of St Augustine, painted at the very beginning of the sixteenth century as part of a cycle honouring the patron saints of the small confraternity or school of Dalmatian merchants and craftsmen living in Venice (the Schiavoni). St Augustine is shown in his study gazing out of his window towards a light which shines through it. In fact the saint being honoured in the painting was not Augustine, as might be imagined, but the austere and cantankerous Jerome, famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin. Carpaccio has depicted the legend that told of how, at the moment of Jerome’s death, just as Augustine was in the act of writing to him, a bright light flooded Augustine’s study and he realized that the great man was no longer on earth. The moment is cleverly dramatized not so much through the reaction of Augustine as through the little Maltese dog who sits on the floor transfixed by the light. It is said that Carpaccio modelled his Augustine on Cardinal Bessarion – formerly the archbishop of Nicaea – who had granted special indulgences to the confraternity and who, as noted earlier, had donated a great library of Greek manuscripts to Venice in 1468. The study is that of the quintessential Renaissance scholar. Books, music, astrolabes and an armillary sphere are neatly placed around the well-ordered room. Christian images, including a gilt bronze of Christ on the recess altar, alternate with pieces of Greek pottery and ancient spear-heads. There among them on the shelf is a small bronze of what seems to be one of the St Mark’s horses. This is not a fanciful suggestion, as it is known that bronze copies of them were made. One is now to be found in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, another in the National Museum in Munich and yet another in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.

  In Carpaccio’s The Vision of St Augustine (early sixteenth century), a typical Renaissance interior is shown. On the shelf to the left, a model of one of the horses can be seen. Several of these bronze copies from the period survive. (Scuola di S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venezia/Scala)

  By the sixteenth century, then, the horses of St Mark’s seem to have worked themselves into the consciousness of many – artists, sculptors, ‘tourists’ in Venice and, of course, the Venetians themselves, to whom they were a matter of the greatest pride. The square that they overlooked had also been transformed. As already mentioned, in the 1490s a new clock tower, the Torre dell’Orologio, was built for the city. The site was an impressive one, on the northern side of the Piazza but directly facing the Piazzetta so that as the visitor landed he would see the large clock face fitting neatly at the end of his line of vision with the Campanile on one side and the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s on the other. The site of the Torre was also an entrance point into the commercial part of the city, and so it acted to reinforce the separation of the Piazza as a distinct ceremonial area.

  This late sixteenth-century view of the Piazzetta (by an unknown artist) shows the scene that would have greeted a visitor landing from the Bacino. Note how the southern façade of St Mark’s and the clock tower enhance the vista. Sansovino’s celebrated Library is in place on the left and his Loggetta, a meeting place for nobles before and after councils, can be seen at the foot of the Campanile. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Beziers, France/Bridgeman Art Library)

  The whole northern side of the Piazza alongside the Torre was given a facelift after the Procuratie Vecchie was damaged in 1514 in one of Venice’s many fires. The new building, completed in 1526, was in full Renaissance style, with three columned storeys, but characteristically is much lighter in tone than one would find in Italian cities on the mainland. On the bottom floor were shops, just as there are today, while the procurators let out the elegant apartments on the two higher floors to raise revenue for their building works. The procurators themselves were housed in a corresponding building on the south side of the Piazza, completed in the seventeenth century.

  Further to enhance the grandeur of the area, three new buildings were commissioned by the Senate in the 1530s to fill the area on the west side of the Piazzetta. The first was a new state mint, the Zecca, on the shoreline itself. This was a strictly functional building. It had to keep all the gold and silver for the city’s coinage secure and also contain the furnaces which minted it. The architect was Jacopo Sansovino, a Florentine who came to Venice via Rome, where he had served his apprenticeship as sculptor and architect. In 1529 he was appointed the superintendent of all the building works for which the procurators were responsible. Having completed the Zecca he turned to his second commission, the most prestigious of the three: a grand new library to run in the space between the Zecca and the Piazzetta back to the Campanile. This building, in both style and function, marked the high point of the Venetian love affair with antiquity. It was constructed to house, as it still does, the library of Greek texts left to the city by Cardinal Bessarion in 1468. Yet at the same time it was a Roman building replete with allusions to the Roman past. It even had a room set aside for young nobles in which to learn how to read the classics in the original languages. Sansovino’s transformation of this area was completed by the Loggetta, a meeting place for nobles, built at the foot of the Campanile. All these buildings are happily intact, despite suffering some damage when the Campanile collapsed in 1902, and they provide a satisfying complement to the classical horses across the way on their loggia.

  ‘Our ancestors’, proclaimed the Venetian Senate in 1535,

  have always striven and been vigilant so as to provide this city with most beautiful temples, private buildings and spacious squares, so that from a wild and uncul
tivated refuge … it has grown, been ornamented and constructed so as to become the most beautiful and illustrious city which at present exists in the world.

  As always with the Venetians there was more than a touch of self-congratulation here, but by the sixteenth century the transformation of swamp and marshes into one of the grandest cities of Europe was complete. The horses were among its greatest treasures.

  12

  THE HORSES IN AN AGE OF DECADIMENTO

  These horses are advanced on certaine curious and beautiful pillars, to the end that they may be the more conspicuously seene of every person. Of their forefeete, there is but one set on a pillar, and that is of porphyrie marble, the other foote he holdeth up very bravely in his pride, which maketh an excellent shew … Two of these horses are set on one side of that beautiful alabaster border full of imagerie and other singular devices, and the other two on the other side. Which yeeldeth a marvellous grace to this frontispiece of the Church, and so greatly are esteemed by the Venetians, that although they have beene offered for them their weight in gold by the King of Spaine, yet they will not sell them.

  The man who penned these words, Thomas Coryat (1577– 1617), stands high in the annals of English eccentrics. Originally from Somerset, the son of a clergyman, he became a hanger-on at the court of King James I, where he was known for his wit and buffoonery. He seemed to revel, in fact, in being made to look a fool by the more rumbustious courtiers. That there was something more to the man became clear in 1607 when his father died and he determined to use his inheritance to set out on a continental journey. Between May and October 1608 he travelled some 1,975 miles across Europe, most of them, he bragged, on foot. (He later donated his walking shoes to his local church, where they are known to have been preserved for at least a hundred years.) He spent six weeks in Venice and gives us one of the most lively accounts in English of the city, with every detail of daily life from the conduct of courtesans (information gathered, he insists, only through hearsay) to the habits of Venetian wives and the spectacle of public torture in the Piazza, as well as descriptions of the main monuments. Having published this and other accounts of his travels as Coryat’s Crudities in 1611, he set off again the next year, this time on a trek which took him as far as India, where, overcome with feasting among a colony of English merchants, he died in 1617.