The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Benjamin Haydon placed the head of the horse from the Parthenon pediment (left) alongside one of the horses of St Mark’s in order to denigrate the latter (1819). (Charles Freeman)

  The head of one of the horses drawing the chariot of the moon-goddess Selene, from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, 430s BC. This was the head idealized by Haydon (see previous page). (Ancient Art & Architecture Collection)

  Haydon took his campaign to Europe. His article in the Annals of Fine Arts was translated as ‘Comparaison entre la tête d’un des Chevaux de Venise et la tête du Cheval d’Elgin du Parthénon’, and in this form it came to the attention of Goethe. At first Goethe, who as we have seen had examined the horses at close quarters on his visits to Venice twenty-five years before, rejected Haydon’s denigration as unjust. Then he saw a cast of the Parthenon horse and had to acknowledge that it was the equal of those in Venice (he had his own cast of one of the horses’ heads to compare it with). On the other hand, he refused to make a comparison of quality. While accepting that ‘the artist [of the Parthenon] had created the original ideal of the horse … among intelligent people there could be no question that through both of these works we are presented with a new conception of nature and art.’ He echoed the comments of others when he argued that comparisons with an ideal and comparisons with truth to nature were equally valid ways of assessing the quality of a work of art. Such an approach had its advantages in that it enabled those who had been conditioned to see the Apollo Belvedere and its companions as the high point of ancient art to keep their enthusiasm intact while remaining receptive to the Parthenon sculptures. The two groups of works represented the pinnacles of two different kinds of art. However, from now on the Apollo Belvedere began to fall from favour. It was acknowledged as a copy of something earlier, perhaps not even a good one at that, and unable to stand comparison with the original work of so many centuries before.

  Haydon’s attack, then, failed to win wider support, but in Venice a fresh battle was breaking out over the origins of the horses, one which reflected wider debates over the classical past in a Europe now caught up in the throes of nationalism and romanticism. In an earlier chapter it was noted that Venice had been happy to draw on the pasts of both Greece and Rome, but by the early nineteenth century the debate over the rival merits of the two cultures reached a new intensity. It is a Venetian, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who deserves the credit for reviving interest in the architectural achievements of Rome. Born in Venice in 1720, the son of a stonemason, Piranesi absorbed Roman history as a boy and by 1740 he was on his way to Rome ‘to admire and learn from those august relics which still remain of Roman majesty and magnificence, the most perfect there is of Architecture’. His famous Vedute (scenes) of Rome, his Capricci, made up of imagined Roman buildings, and his meticulous measurement and drawing of surviving Roman buildings gave him an international reputation, enhanced by the ease with which his prints (of which there were eventually over a thousand) could be bought in Rome and taken home by travellers on the Grand Tour. Goethe’s first views of Rome had been through Piranesi’s prints, and their impact was such that he was disappointed to find that Roman buildings appeared much smaller than he had imagined from Piranesi’s grandiose reconstructions.

  Crucially, Piranesi became the champion of ancient Rome against Greece. When challenged by travellers who had visited Athens and who maintained that Greek architecture was superior to Roman, Piranesi replied that Roman architecture was much more creative and richer in variety, and had a magnificence in its conception which the Greeks could not match. One only had to look at the range of Roman buildings, from aqueducts to bath houses, amphitheatres to sewer systems, he said, to see the point. Understandably, Piranesi was furious with Winckelmann for championing the Greeks so exclusively. ‘Must the genius of our artists be so basely enslaved to the Grecian manners, as not to dare to take what is beautiful from elsewhere, if it not be of Grecian origin?’ he inveighed. There was also much to be found, he argued, in Egyptian and Etruscan art; in one of his more outrageous and unbalanced judgements, Piranesi went so far as to suggest that the Greeks themselves had borrowed from Etruscan art and then debased it!

  By the time Piranesi died in Rome in 1778 he had established that Roman architecture had to be taken seriously and that Greece was not necessarily the canon by which taste should be set. His prints had their impact. All over Europe and even in America Roman-style buildings appeared (the dome and the arch are the most common pointers to a Roman inspiration). His achievement merged into the revived sense of Italian nationalism which was animated by the plunderings of Napoleon. As we have seen, Napoleon’s legacy was an ambiguous one in that he destroyed elements of the Roman past by removing so many original works of art from their Italian settings, but he also recreated Roman ideals of imperial power in his capital. This clash between destruction of the Roman past and ‘classical’ rebuilding could be seen in Venice itself. In an attempt to create an imperial palace in the city, Napoleon ordered the demolition of the west side of the Piazza San Marco, including Sansovino’s Church of San Geminiano, so that the Procuratie Nuove, on the south side of the Piazza, could be extended round the Piazza and have a ballroom included in it. Thus on their return the horses found themselves looking down the Piazza towards a neoclassical building, one which, it has to be admitted, was not totally out of harmony with the rest of the square. (Its bays echo those of Sansovino’s Library.) The height of the ballroom required the new building to be vaulted, and the vault itself was faced on the side overlooking St Mark’s with, appropriately enough, statues of Roman emperors.

  The ‘Roman is best’ theme was also developed by the director of the Venetian Academy, Count Leopoldo Cicognara. Cicognara, an Italian aristocrat born in 1767 in Ferrara, devoted his early life to art and good living, but he was a man of the Enlightenment and his political sympathies were liberal. He had supported the ideals of the French Revolution, at least until the moment when Louis XVI was executed. Even then, his attachment to France revived and persisted long enough for him to welcome the French revolutionary armies to Italy. He even dedicated a treatise, Il Bello, ‘The Beautiful’, to Napoleon himself. In 1808, with Venice now part of Napoleon’s kingdom of Italy, he was made president of the Venetian Academy, and he lived out the rest of his life in the city. It was he who insisted that the horses be returned to the loggia on their return, rather than being placed by the waterfront as Canova had suggested.

  In the years preceding Napoleon’s overthrow Cicognara had embarked on a major history of sculpture, one in which he tried to place styles and achievements within the context of political events. An important influence on his view of classical history was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the English historian had argued that the adoption of Christianity had brought about the fall of the empire. Gibbon had said little about art, but Cicognara linked the decline in classical art, as Gibbon had linked the decay of the empire to ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’. Christians, he argued, had always hated fine art and it was they, not the Goths, who had been responsible for destroying it as the empire collapsed in the fifth century AD. Had not Pope Gregory the Great ordered that all pagan art be thrown in the Tiber? (It is now known that this story was a much later fabrication; Gregory, a Roman aristocrat, tended to be more moderate in such matters.) Was not the sack of Rome by the Christian Emperor Charles V in 1527 far more destructive than the sack by the Goths? (This was a deliberately provocative point but one which contained some truth in that the Goths’ ‘sack’ of Rome in 410 had been comparatively restrained.)

  Implicit in Cicognara’s argument was the assumption that Roman art did not contain the seeds of its own decay and that it deserved recognition in its own right, a view which supported Piranesi’s interpretation. Cicognara valued the horses of St Mark’s precisely because, as he argued, they were Roman art. In a treatise on the horses published in Venice in 1815 he perpetuated the idea that they came from the time
of Nero, but backed it with evidence that went beyond mere tradition. He argued that the almost pure copper of which the horses were made, together with their gilding, argued for a date in the early centuries AD, while what he saw as their ‘heavy’ style suggested Italian rather than eastern models. The most likely setting for a quadriga in this period was a Roman triumphal arch. This and the evidence of Tacitus, he argued, combined to make the reign of Nero the most likely date for their manufacture.

  The argument that the horses were of Roman origin was also put forward in another pamphlet, issued in 1817 by one Count Girolamo Andrea Dandolo, a youthful descendant of the family responsible for their seizure. Dandolo claimed that these were chariot horses, had been on Nero’s triumphal arch and had then been taken to Constantinople. He identified the chariot with that mentioned in the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai as bearing a sun-god and standing in the Milion in the city. The head of Nero (the original charioteer) had, said Dandolo, been taken off and replaced with one of the sun-god.

  These views were soon challenged. When the horses had been in Paris, the consensus among the French connoisseurs had been that they were Greek. One Joseph Leitz argued from the style of their manes that they were by either the sculptor Myron or Polyclitus, the master of proportion. Myron, who came from Eleutherae, on the border between the Attic plain and Boeotia, in central Greece, was active between 470 and 440 BC, and thus has the honour of being the earliest sculptor to whom the horses have been attributed. Copies of several of his sculptures, notably his discus thrower, survive, but there is nothing in his work which can convincingly link him to the horses (although it is known that ‘animals’ were among the pieces he produced). Leitz’s attribution seems to be another case of the horses being linked to a prominent name on the assumption that they ‘deserved’ a great sculptor. A Greek origin (Lysippus again) was supported by a M. de Choiseul-Daillecourt in 1809, and a different one – the horses from Chios mentioned in the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai as the set brought to Constantinople – by a M. Sobry in 1810.

  So Cicognara’s assertion in his treatise of 1815 that the horses originated in Rome was bound to excite a reaction from the ‘Greek’ supporters; and it came, in 1816, in the shape of a pamphlet by a German enthusiast for Greece, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845). Schlegel was a polymath, a translator of Shakespeare (he managed to complete translations of seventeen of the plays), the founder of Sanskrit studies in Germany and, with his younger brother Friedrich, a spearhead of a German national Romanticism which found its roots in ancient Greece. Winckelmann, of course, wrote in German, and the erotic intensity of his writings had gained him a wide readership among intellectuals, including Goethe. So the ‘superiority’ of the Greeks over ‘the decadent Romans’ became part of the received wisdom of Germany’s cultural elite, a principle embedded in German intellectual life. It gained particular force as a model for German renewal after the traumatic defeat of Prussia, the largest of the German states, by Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt. The inspirational figure here was Wilhelm von Humboldt, a nobleman from Brandenburg who was briefly head of the education section of the ministry of the interior and founder in 1810 of the University of Berlin. Humboldt believed a spiritual transformation was essential if Prussian confidence were to be restored and that it was to be found in the ancient Greeks. Not only did the commitment of the Greeks to their cities provide the model for civic involvement, but their culture was infused with the finest art and poetry. In Greece man had been ennobled by his religion – not humiliated, as in Christianity – and Greek thinkers had established the foundations of ethics. In short, Greece provided everything that was needed for revival. Through a study of ancient Greek (which Humboldt made central to the curriculum and compulsory for those wishing to enter university), this great culture could be explored and absorbed.

  It was hardly surprising, then, that a leading German intellectual such as Schlegel would be determined to claim the horses for the Greeks; but this was more than a romantic assertion. Schlegel attacked Cicognara’s treatise systematically. He pointed out, rightly, that the Greeks also created sculptures of quadrigae as commemorations of their successes in the games. There had been one, for instance, on the Acropolis in Athens. With less supporting evidence, he argued that the Greeks gilded their statues and copied different breeds of horses, so that one could not identify art as Roman simply because it depicted ‘heavy’ horses. As for an actual sculptor, he opted for Lysippus, as Haydon had done, thus placing the horses in the Greek world of the fourth century BC. He even suggested that they might be a victory monument from the Olympic Games.

  For all the arguments back and forth, the problem remained that the horses were simply not datable on the evidence that existed at the time. Their creation was still being attributed to sculptors from the fifth century BC to the first century AD. Comparisons of style and literary texts were being used freely in support of widely varying conclusions, all advanced with far more conviction than the evidence allowed. Nor were the arguments confined to the aesthetic; in both Germany and Italy, powerful nationalist forces acted to shape and prejudice the debate.

  In Venice the growing strength of Italian nationalism became evident in 1822 when Canova died, probably of stomach cancer, in a room overlooking the Piazza San Marco. It fell to Cicognara, a staunch admirer and friend of the great sculptor, to preside over the funeral arrangements. Cicognara had kept his post as president of the Venetian Academy under the Austrian rulers, but his known anti-clerical feelings and his championing of Italian nationalism had made the authorities deeply suspicious of him. Canova’s own position was less clear – he had been more receptive to the Austrians, who had supported his campaign for the restoration of Venice’s treasures, and he was more sympathetic to Catholicism – but among the people as a whole he was seen as representing the forces of Italian nationalism. The Austrian authorities in Venice were caught in a dilemma. They could hardly deny Canova a fine funeral, but they feared popular unrest. So strict rules about how the ceremony should be conducted were laid down. No one could wear black, the colour associated with the carbonari (literally, ‘the charcoal burners’), the revolutionary associations which campaigned for the expulsion of Italy’s foreign rulers, and an exact funeral route was specified.

  But the nationalists were not to be thwarted. Cicognara and his supporters turned out in green, the colour of the royal house of Savoy, which was seen as a focus for Italian unity. The funeral was held in St Mark’s – nowhere else was fitting – but Cicognara managed to circumvent the instructions about the route of the funeral procession and had the coffin brought into the Academy, where he made an impassioned speech over it. (Canova’s heart was later enshrined in the Academy and is now buried in the Church of Santa Maria dei Frari; the rest of him went home to Possagno, to lie in a massive neoclassical temple he had designed himself.) An outpouring of sonnets and pamphlets lamenting Canova’s death showed how deeply he had penetrated the Italian consciousness, and his monument to Alfieri in Florence became a patriotic shrine. ‘May these precious names, so dear to the fatherland of Alfieri and Canova, united for ever and respected by Time the destroyer, uphold and witness to remote posterity the glory and splendour of Italy,’ wrote one admirer. No wonder, then, that the nationalists insisted that the horses, saved as they had been from the French, were Italian in origin.

  17

  FRAGMENTED IMAGINATIONS: THE REINVENTION OF VENICE

  WITH THE FRENCH GONE AND THE AUSTRIANS RETURNED, Venice suffered a period of economic collapse. Over 90 per cent of the servants who kept the great palaces running are said to have lost their jobs. The Austrians developed their own port at Trieste just along the coast, and it was only in the 1830s, when Venice was given the status of a free city, that some form of recovery began. A new, wealthy Venetian bourgeoisie emerged, and in 1846 the city was given a further boost by the building of the railway bridge across the lagoon. Well might Gustav von Aschenbach, the narrator of Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice, complain that ‘to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door’; but the loss of the city’s cherished isolation also led to new commercial links and the first mass tourism. It was in the 1840s that the total number of tourists visiting the city exceeded the resident population (around 120,000) for the first time. There was now a realistic chance of economic survival.