The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  The Venice that Coryat visited in 1608 was at the beginning of a long decline – the years of decadimento, as one of Venice’s most celebrated historians, Pompeo Molmenti, called it – which was to end in its extinction as a republic in 1797. The sixteenth century was, in fact, the turning point, even though to the outside world Venice remained an impressive city and there were still great moments in its history. One was the major naval victory of 1571 when an alliance of Christian forces, of which the Venetians were the largest contingent, destroyed a Turkish fleet which they trapped in the Bay of Lepanto (Just inside the Gulf of Corinth). Despite their reliance on a foreign commander, Don John of Austria, the half-brother of King Philip II of Spain, and allied forces, the Venetians were quick to appropriate the glory. The first of the galleys to reach home entered the lagoon with its guns blazing and its crews shouting ‘Vittoria, Vittoria’, captured Turkish flags trailing behind it. However, Lepanto was never exploited and no fully effective campaign was ever launched again against the Turks. Nor was the victory unadulterated: just before the battle one of Venice’s most prized possessions, Cyprus, had been lost to the Turks.

  In 1574 a visit by the new king of France, Henry III, showed the city at its most sumptuous. The aim of the Venetians’ invitation was to warn Henry off an alliance with Spain which risked being turned against Venice. The entry of the young king (aged only twenty-three) was carefully staged. All laws which restrained aristocratic display were set aside for the visit. He was met on the coast by a fleet of gilded gondolas and sixty senators. Then he was rowed out to Murano, where he was joined by forty young Venetian noblemen who were to be his suite for the visit. The next day the doge, Alvise Mocenigo, arrived in the Bucintoro, the state barge, to take Henry to a welcoming mass at San Nicolo on the Lido. The barge then continued across the lagoon and up the Grand Canal to Palazzo Foscari, which had been set aside as the king’s home for the next week. He was shown all the sights of the city, saw a complete galley being built in a day, attended a meeting of the Senate, and even, it is said, took time to enjoy the favours of one of Venice’s most celebrated courtesans, Veronica Franco (who showed off her accomplishments by writing him a poem). Then the real business of the visit began. The doge carefully but firmly initiated the king into the realities of European politics. Spain was too powerful; France needed to rely on the wisdom of Venice when formulating its policy. Henry, a devout Catholic and hence reluctant to challenge that most austerely Catholic of monarchs, Philip, was careful not to commit himself; but it was said that memories of his glittering reception in Venice lasted for the rest of his life.

  Among the obligatory treats laid on for Henry was a visit to Titian, now an elderly man but long acknowledged as the leading painter of Europe. Titian had been born towards the end of the fifteenth century (his date of birth is unknown) in a small town in the Dolomites, in Venetian territory but 60 miles north of the city. Arriving in Venice around 1510, he learned his trade through the patronage of the Bellini brothers, Gentile and Giovanni, but his first great commission, the Assumption painted for the Church of Santa Maria dei Frari, is an extraordinary achievement, both for its size (it remains the largest panel painting in existence) and for its originality. It still dominates the central altar of the church. The Virgin soars upwards to where God the Father is waiting to draw her into to a heaven suffused with light. Below, still on earth, the apostles are pulled by their adoration towards her but, of course, remain rooted to the ground. No wonder its unveiling in 1518 was a major event. As Titian extended his range from altarpieces to portraits, from classical mythology to sensual nudes, and learned to manipulate oil paints to create a majestic range of hues and tones, he built up an awesome reputation across Europe and in fact became the first artist to be treated as an international celebrity. By 1550 he was able to show himself in a self-portrait in which he is presented richly dressed in a manner reminiscent of an opulent Venetian merchant. The gold chain of the Knights of the Golden Spur, conferred on him by the emperor Charles V, hangs around his neck. There is, in fact, a good story of Charles V visiting Titian in his study, and when Titian dropped his brush by mistake, stooping to pick it up. Titian not only elevated Venetian painting to new heights but set in motion a revolution in the status of the artist.

  Titian died a very old man in a devastating outbreak of plague which swept across Venice in 1575–7, killing perhaps a third of the population. Once the worst was over the Senate commissioned a church in thanksgiving from the most gifted architect of his day, Andrea Palladio. Like Titian, Palladio had been born on the mainland, at Padua in 1508, but it was only after he had completed a large number of country villas and public buildings in and around the city of Vicenza that he was able to win any commissions in Venice itself. While Sansovino had been prepared to compromise with the procurators by incorporating Venetian motifs into his work, Palladio was strongly influenced by the Roman architect Vitruvius, author of the only architectural treatise to have survived from the classical past (the first scholarly edition of this great work had actually been printed in Venice, in 1511). He adopted and stuck to a purer classicism than Sansovino, but this did not appeal to the procurators and when he applied for the post of chief architect of the public works in 1554, he was unsuccessful. Interestingly, the church proved more receptive to his designs and gave him his first commissions in Venice in the 1560s. Outstanding among them was the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. As always with Palladio’s buildings, the setting was central to the design: the church looks majestically across the Bacino towards the Piazzetta. Equally stunning in its position was the Church of the Redentore, the thanksgiving offering to Christ the Redeemer, which stands on the island of the Giudecca, facing directly on the city from the south. These were majestic churches, the grandeur and simplicity of their interiors enhanced by the white Istrian marble (also used for the exteriors) and effective use of light. This was architecture as theatre, and there was no better place in Europe for Palladio’s talent to be displayed than Venice. His influence spread throughout the continent and proved as important in architecture as Titian’s influence was in painting. So, even though one can spot the first signs of an economic decline which seems in retrospect to be inevitable, in the sixteenth century Venice could claim with some justification to be still at the forefront of European cultural life.

  Just as new work from Palladio, Titian and their contemporaries, much of which drew on classical forms or mythology, was spreading across Europe, so too was a more cultured awareness of the classical past itself. Thomas Coryat was one of a growing number of travellers to Italy in the seventeenth century who could see a wide range of antiquities, whether on open display, as the horses were, or in collections open to the public. In Rome in 1471 Pope Sixtus IV had ‘restored’ four Roman bronzes to the governors of the city, and these were to be the founding donation of the Capitoline Museums. Splendidly housed in Michelangelo’s buildings and added to over succeeding centuries (the popes sometimes passed on nude sculptures considered inappropriate for the Vatican galleries), the Museums became and remain one of the greatest collections of antique sculpture in the world. In 1503 another pope, Julius II, extended an ancient villa, known as the Belvedere, which stood on higher ground behind the Vatican Palace, down to the palace itself to create a walled garden for the display of sculpture. The sculptures were placed in niches in the walls among orange and mulberry trees; some were even incorporated into fountains. One of Julius’ first acquisitions for the Belvedere was the famous statue of the Laocoön, dug up in Rome in 1506.* Equally famous was an Apollo, the Apollo Belvedere, considered by some enthusiasts to be the most beautiful Greek statue of all time. The Belvedere, with its cool running water, shade and careful placing of antiquities, became the ideal gallery and was copied by many others – the gallery housing the collections of the Austrian emperors in Vienna even carried the same name.

  By the seventeenth century other great collections had been established in Rome: the Ludovisi (still in Rom
e and now beautifully displayed there in the Palazzo Altemps), the Borghese (also still in Rome) and the Medici on the Pincio Hill. A home for the treasures of the Medici collection was created in Florence by the grand duke of Tuscany and head of the Medici family, Francesco, when he converted the city offices (the uffizi) into galleries for art and added a sumptuous room, the Tribuna, for the display of his sculptures. Pride of place in the Tribuna was given to a Venus, the Venus de’Medici, but it became home to other famous statues too such as the bronze Dancing Faun and a crouching figure known as the Arrotino (Knife-grinder). Paintings by Titian, Raphael and Rubens lined the walls. By the late seventeenth century the Tribuna was perhaps the most famous room in the world, as much a cultural icon as the Sistine Chapel is today.

  Italy’s dominance in this world of antiquity was total. It was not, for instance, until as late as the 1630s that England got its first glimpse of original antiquities. It was to Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel (1585–1646), that ‘this corner of the world owed its first sight of Greek and Roman statues’. The ‘Collector Earl’ bid energetically for sculptures in Rome and even dug up his own in the Forum, in the earliest known overseas archaeological excavation by an Englishman, while his agents scoured the Aegean for original Greek works. Arundel was particularly fond of Venice and he bought a mass of Palladio’s drawings, which a travelling companion, the young architect Inigo Jones, used to introduce Palladianism to England.

  Only the very wealthiest collectors, however, could hope to collect originals (Arundel burdened his family with debt for generations to come) and many had to be content with full-scale casts of the most famous statues. Moulds were created by covering the original statue with a liquid (the composition of which remains unknown) and then placing quick-drying plaster around it. The pieces of plaster were taken off and could then be reassembled into a mould which would be held together by an outer layer of plaster. This would be carefully packed and sent off to the casters, who might be in another part of Europe altogether. Francis I of France (b. 1494; r. 1515–47) was a pioneer collector of copies. He ordered a bronze replica of the Spinario, the boy taking a thorn from his foot, which was one of the founding statues of the Capitoline Museums. The Florentine Benvenuto Cellini arranged the contract, while the caster was none other than Cellini’s friend Jacopo Sansovino, the Venetian architect – long before taking up architecture, he had made his name as a sculptor with a cast of the Laocoön. Francis’ enthusiasm knew no bounds. A mass of plaster moulds of other statues – one single consignment contained fifty-eight cases – made their way from Rome to Paris and the resulting copies, most of them in bronze, were displayed in the king’s chateau at Fontainebleau. The moulds were solid enough for a second collection of copies to be made for Francis’ sister-in-law, the widowed queen of Hungary, who wished to decorate the gardens of her Italianate palace near Brussels.

  Bronze remained the most prestigious material for copies. As one Florentine sculptor and specialist in bronze casts, Massimiliani Soldani, put it, only in bronze could ‘the softness and grace of contours’ of the original works be preserved. Others preferred to sculpt in marble, while the cheapest option was to cast in plaster. This method made casts affordable to ordinary artists, who were encouraged by Bernini, the greatest sculptor of the seventeenth century, to learn to copy from casts ‘of all the most beautiful statues, bas-reliefs and busts of antiquity’ before drawing from nature itself. This instruction established a model of education for artists which was to last into the twentieth century. The plaster-cast galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are still intact.

  So the courts of northern Europe and – in England in particular – the gardens and halls of aristocrats began to be filled with copies of antique statues. It was Charles I who secured the earliest bronze copy of the Venus de’ Medici, which remains today in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court. In the 1660s another French king, Louis XIV, outdid all his fellow sovereigns in the range and number of antiquities he had copied for the gardens of Versailles. Some were in marble, some in bronze; some were exact copies of the originals, others freestyle interpretations, works of art in their own right. (While Francis had delighted in embarrassing the ladies of his court with nude statues, Louis was more circumspect. One celebrated Venus was reproduced with the naked backside of the original covered in swirling drapery.) ‘The best of Italy is now in France,’ boasted the king’s minister Colbert, ‘and Paris is the new Rome.’ This was a wild exaggeration, for the king had hardly any originals in his collection; but it proved to have been prescient at the end of the next century when, as we have seen, Napoleon was to ravish Italy for the finest works of art and include the horses of St Mark’s among his loot.

  For those who could not see the originals or more than a few copies, the first books of engravings began to appear in the early eighteenth century. In France, one Bernard de Montfaucon had a collection of some thirty or forty thousand images of ancient art, and they were assembled into his L’Antiquité expliquée, the first volumes of which appeared in Paris in 1724. The work was so comprehensive that it served as the indispensable reference book on ancient art for over a century. The Venetian equivalent came a few years later, in 1740, when two cousins, Anton Maria di Gerolamo Zanetti and Anton Maria Alessandro Zanetti, published a survey of all the ancient Greek and Roman statues to be found in public places in the city. Pride of place was given to those displayed in the anteroom of Sansovino’s Library, but the horses of St Mark’s are represented too, in a fine set of engravings. The Zanettis took a cautious view of the horses’ origins. They repeated the story that they had been taken from Rome to Constantinople by Constantine and acknowledged that there was some sense in it, even though they had to accept it was no more than popular tradition. They suggested the reign of Nero as the likely date of their casting and reproduced the Roman coin which showed a quadriga, possibly the horses themselves, on Nero’s triumphal arch.

  In 1740 the Zanetti cousins produced a series of engravings of Venetian sculptures, the horses of St Mark’s among them. They are interesting because they show the horses’ collars intact. Sometime between 1740 and 1815, most likely on their travels to and from France, they were vandalized and much of the decoration removed. (Giuseppe Fioretti)

  Although the Zanettis were unable to give any good reasons for their attributions, their work suggested that they were taking a much more critical approach to sculpture than their Renaissance predecessors. A great step forward had been made when one Jonathan Richardson, an Englishman who visited Italy in 1721, had written up an account of his journey in collaboration with his father, a portrait painter. It was published as An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, etc., with Remarks in 1722. What distinguished the Richardsons’ study of their travels from the many others on the market was their appetite for the artistic value of antique statues. Jonathan Richardson told how he spent no less than ten hours in the Tribuna and how he could not last there for three minutes without returning to the Medici Venus. The Richardsons probed the background to the sculptures. They realized, for instance, that many of the names actually carved on the great statues of Rome featured nowhere in Pliny or other accounts. There were many classical sculptors of whom nothing was known; and conversely it was accepted that the great statues of antiquity that were mentioned by Pliny either had not survived or were yet to be rediscovered. The Richardsons had mastered enough classical history to know that there had been major disruptions as the Roman empire had disintegrated and the barbarians had invaded. They realized that in many cases Christians or barbarians would have destroyed statues and that bronzes were melted down for their metal. What had survived had been preserved through chance. It was as if, they said, a great library had been shipwrecked and only a few, randomly picked volumes had been washed ashore. They also recognized that many surviving statues were copies of others, and in most cases these were indistinguishable from each other in quality. As an example they showed
through comparison with images on coins that a Standing Venus in the Vatican was a copy of one of the most famous statues of the ancient world, Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus.

  Jonathan Richardson had hoped to visit Venice but an outbreak of plague in Marseilles in 1720–2 – incidentally, the last great outbreak of bubonic plague in European history – prevented him from taking ship there. Yet even if he never saw the horses of St Mark’s, he had provided a context in which they could be reassessed. Just because they were the only quadriga to survive did not mean that they were necessarily the work of Phidias or Lysippus or any other sculptor mentioned by Pliny. They could be the creation of a completely unknown sculptor, or they could be a copy of an earlier sculpture. With no direct equivalent by which to measure them, nothing much more could be said about their origin.

  It was in the eighteenth century, however, that one important thing about them was discovered. The age of the alchemists and of Aristotelian physics (according to which all matter was made from four basic elements) was over, and with the emergence of scientific chemistry it was now possible to treat metals as coherent and consistent elements which could be separated and purified. Chemical analysis was possible, and when the horses were subjected to proper scrutiny it was found that they were in fact not of bronze but of almost pure copper, never less than 97 per cent in the samples tested. This was a remarkable finding, for copper has such a high melting point in comparison to bronze that a large copper statue was virtually impossible to make. The mystery of why the horses were cast in copper will be explored in the final chapter.