The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Gathered in the grand gallery of the Louvre were the treasures of Roman and Venetian art. The bronze lion was the lion of Saint Mark, the paintings the finest ornaments of the monasteries, the churches, and even the main council chamber of Venice. The Sistine Madonna had lately hung in the chapel of the pope in Rome, while Laocöon and Apollo had stood in the endless galleries of the Vatican. In the republic whose motto was “liberty, equality, fraternity,” the emblems of triumph were not slaves, nor piles of gold, nor martial trophies, but works of art, placed on display in a museum for the admiration of the people.

  An arch was erected opposite the Louvre in the Place du Carrousel. The four bronze horses who had led the triumph were provided with a bronze chariot, and then they were placed on top of the arch, in memory of the occasion.

  IT HAD ALL happened before: as the triumphant French well knew, the bronze horses had presided over triumphs in the capital city of another republic for nearly six hundred years. Every year on Ascension Day the doge would go from his palace to the basilica of San Marco, which was his chapel and the treasure house of his republic, to celebrate the triumph of Venice. He would kneel before the Pala d’Oro, an altarpiece studded with gems and glistering with gold, beneath which were buried the wonder-working relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist himself. Above the doge’s head hung five domes arranged in a Greek cross. They were covered in mosaics that, sparkling in the twilight, narrated the story of the republic and the saints and the angels that guarded it.

  Then the trumpets would sound, and the doge would emerge from the darkness of San Marco into the sunlit piazza outside. He would proceed down to the water between two granite columns, on top of which were mounted the two patrons of Venice: Saint Theodore standing on his crocodile and Saint Mark represented in the form of a winged lion. The doge would board his ceremonial barge, the Bucintoro; and he would sail through the lagoon and out to the open sea, where he would cast a golden ring into the water to reconsecrate the marriage of Venice to that element.

  Having consummated the union, the doge would return to San Marco and stand on a balcony over the basilica’s west doors. Above him were gilded kiosks crowded with countless carved saints; beneath, an arcade lined with sheets of precious green and red marble, set here and there with sculptures of Hercules and the caesars of old. And from the very heart of this facade, below the saints and above the basilica’s central door, rode forth the four bronze horses. Standing between them as if he were driving their chariot, the doge would review his citizens as they processed round and round the piazza below him. Dressed in a golden mantle and holding the insignia of his office, he was frozen in an attitude as rigid and regal as that of an oriental emperor.

  IT HAD ALL happened before, of course, or at least that’s what the Venetians told their new French masters in 1798. The four bronze horses—and the gem-studded icons of the Pala d’Oro and the winged lion—had presided over triumphs in the capital city of yet another republic for eight hundred years. On the anniversary of the foundation of that city, the emperor would open a door between the Sacred Palace and the Hippodrome; and with his train of magistri, proconsuls, senators, priests, and relics, he would appear in gorgeous array in the imperial box before the citizens of Constantinople.

  The Hippodrome was some fifteen hundred feet long, an elongated bowl of stone seats that, on those days, might be filled with a hundred thousand people. A raised barrier, the spina, ran down the middle of the Hippodrome, dividing it into two tracks. At one end the starting gates resembled a triumphal arch, while at the other the track was curved to allow racing chariots to wheel around an obelisk.

  The primary purpose of the Hippodrome was chariot racing, but it was more than a mere sporting arena. The Blues and Greens, which had started out as two different racing teams, had over time become powerful political factions that could bring the whole empire to its knees. The Milion, the pavilion from which all distances in the empire were measured, stood right by the gates where the chariots started their races.

  The Hippodrome was also the treasure house of the empire. The spina and the starting gates were mounted with two obelisks and a whole menagerie of statuary: sphinxes, a column of brazen snakes twisted around one another, a colossal Hercules in bronze, an elephant wrought in the same material, a Nile horse with a scaly tail, a beautiful Helen of Troy, a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and many more besides. Among them were at least three—and perhaps more—quadrigae of bronze horses, with another tethered to a gilded chariot that was kept inside the Milion.

  On the day of triumph this gilded chariot would be coupled to a foursome of live horses, and a golden statue would be placed inside it. This statue showed Constantine, the founder of the city, dressed as Apollo, the sun god, and holding in his hand a little angel: the guardian spirit of the city. The divine founder was carried around the Hippodrome in his chariot, while the reigning emperor, dressed in gold and standing perfectly still, watched the ritual from his royal box. His attendant priests clouded him in incense and bells as if he were Jupiter the Greatest and Best himself.

  IT HAD ALL happened before, for the quadrigae of the Hippodrome—and the bronze Hercules, and Romulus and Remus, and many other creatures of the Hippodrome’s menagerie—had presided over triumphs in the capital of still another republic for four hundred years. That’s what the citizens of Constantinople said, anyway, and the Venetians were only too willing to believe them.

  Whenever a general—an imperator—achieved a particularly important victory against the barbarians, the Senate and the people would grant him a triumph, and at the head of his army he would enter the city of Rome. All of these triumphs followed the route of the Via Sacra, the holy way that led into the city from the south: past the Colosseum, along the foot of the Palatine Hill, through the Forum, and up under the Tarpeian Rock to the Capitoline Hill, which was crowned with the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Greatest and Best. It was to Jupiter that the shackled barbarians would be brought, so that the proper sacrifices might be made: of their treasures in the temple, their families in the slave market, and their lives in the circus. Jupiter’s temple was hung with the chains of captives, the broken gates of cities, and the truncated deities of defeated republics.

  After they had celebrated each triumph, the imperators of Rome would erect an arch over the Via Sacra so that their victories might be remembered. The arches looked like gaudy city gates, framed with Corinthian columns, bedecked with winged victories, and carved with reliefs and inscriptions depicting the exploits of the generals. (Some of those memorials still stand in Rome to this day: the Arch of Constantine records his victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, while the Arch of Titus depicts with casual pride the sack of the Temple of Jerusalem.) Because the generals had entered the city in chariots, each of their arches was surmounted by a sculpture of horses drawing just such a vehicle. There must have been hundreds of these quadrigae.

  Then the imperators of Rome had their images stamped on coins and carved in marble. They had the sculptors twist their bull necks into the postures of Grecian heroes, lift their dull eyes as if in divine contemplation, and cover their shaven heads in curly wigs—tousled, they hoped, by the winds of history.

  IT HAD ALL happened before. The Venetians, the Constantinopolitans, and the Romans all used to tell a story about the origin of their quadrigae; or, at least, they dimly remembered the last time these horses had run with heroes.

  When he was young, and before all his triumphs, Alexander loved horses. Indeed, he came of a royal line that loved them. One day, his father, Philip, showed Alexander a horse running wild on the plain.

  “No one can tame this horse,” said the king to his son.

  “I shall,” said Alexander.

  “Well, if you can, you can keep him,” his father replied.

  And so Alexander went out into the field. He walked up to the horse, and whispered in its ear, and stroked its neck; and to the amazement of the royal court, Alexander mounted the
steed and rode up to his father as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Alexander named the horse Bucephalus, and the steed became his constant companion, down through the narrow mountain passes into Greece, through the plains of Asia Minor, the deserts of Syria and Egypt, the marshes of Mesopotamia, and the hills of Persia, all the way to the jungles of India.

  When Alexander had conquered the world, he had his portrait taken by the sculptor Lysippus. This Lysippus was skilled in marble and in bronze, and was commissioned to undertake many works, including several quadrigae. The Venetians said—and they must have heard it from the Constantinopolitans, and they from the Romans—that their quadriga was among these.

  Lysippus was skilled in bronze, but more skilled still in transforming the likeness of the barbarian prince into something transcendent and beautiful. Upon seeing his work, Alexander refused to have his portrait made by any other. United in Lysippus’s image of Alexander were both the wild youth, who had conquered Bucephalus and then the world, and the philosopher king, the pupil of Aristotle and the sages of India. Alexander’s head twisting in warlike action called to mind Achilles as he dragged the body of Hector around the walls of Troy; and Alexander’s thoughtful eyes were those of Apollo as he rode through the sky in the chariot of the sun, heading to his home with the muses on Mount Parnassus.

  Apollo’s home—the sanctuary at Delphi on Mount Parnassus—housed both the oracle of the god and a bewildering array of votive gifts that had been given to him in gratitude, supplication, or fear. Before Apollo’s temple stood a column of three twisted snakes, given to him by all the Greeks in thanksgiving for their victory over the Persians at the Battle of Plataea; it had been cast from the armor and weapons stripped from that vanquished Asiatic horde. Beneath the temple was a mysterious cave that spewed forth noxious vapors, under whose influence the priestesses of the sanctuary spoke with the voice of the god. The cave had been stolen, the legend ran, by Apollo from a serpent who had dwelled there since the beginning of the world. It is in such dark caves, filled with poisonous smoke, that myths and legends find their origin.

  There were also games held at the sanctuary of Delphi; and just as cities victorious in war gave images to Apollo, so did the athletes and the charioteers who competed in the stadium. Only one of these images is left: a tall, slim charioteer cast in bronze, who stands with his arms outstretched and his reins in his hands. His horses have disappeared. It would be quite tempting to imagine that two millennia later they ended up in Paris.

  Not that there is any surviving evidence for such a claim. The starting point of the journey of the quadriga—from Greece, to Rome, to Constantinople, to Venice, and to Paris—is unknown for a simple reason: the horses have always been stolen goods. Their presence at all the triumphs from Rome to Paris was invariably under duress. They were not the victors but the vanquished, and history is written only by the victors. All we know about the four horses are the stories their rustlers used to tell about them.

  SOME SAY THE horses were taken by the consul Sulla when he ravaged Greece in the days of the Roman Republic; others say that the quadriga was taken by Augustus, the first Roman emperor, when he did the same. They say he placed them atop his mausoleum in the Field of Mars, associating himself in death with Alexander, and decorated his tomb with paintings of the hero.

  But of all the Roman emperors who were enslaved by the legacy of Alexander, none was more egregious than the emperor Nero. After he had murdered his own natural mother, and after fire had reduced Rome and its treasures to ashes, Nero decided to improve himself by tasting the refined arts of Greece. He played his lyre and enacted tragedies in the theaters. He competed in the arena and the stadium, and, needless to say, he was crowned with the victor’s laurel every time. So impressed was Nero by the culture of Greece that he stripped it of its works of art. From the sanctuary of Delphi alone he removed some five hundred bronze statues and carried them back to Rome. Perhaps the bronze charioteer and his horses were separated in this act of theft.

  Nero’s Grecian antics did not impress his subjects, who expected their imperator to wage war rather than play the lyre, and he realized that he would have to improve his reputation the old Roman way. As it happened, at this time the Romans were engaged in an interminable conflict against the Parthians. Nero seized upon a minor victory in this war and made the Senate grant him a triumph. He was a new Alexander, he said, who, like the ancient hero, had vanquished the Eastern barbarians.

  A triumph was contrived in the capital city of the republic; a procession wound its way from the city gate to the Field of Mars, and the spoils of victory were dedicated in the temple of Jupiter. An arch was hastily erected on the Capitoline Hill, and the four horses, recently stolen from Greece, or perhaps from the mausoleum of Augustus, were placed on top of it. The arch didn’t last long: Nero’s fantasies soon evaporated. He killed himself less than a year after his triumph, and the whole pageant was quietly dismantled.

  NEARLY THREE CENTURIES later, the emperor Constantine decided to move his court from Rome to Byzantium, giving that city a new name: Nova Roma (New Rome). In his new capital Constantine established a palace, a hippodrome, and a forum with a senate house; and in that forum he set up a column topped by a bronze image of Apollo, whose head he removed and replaced with his own. On his deathbed, Constantine was baptized into the Christian faith and declared himself the fourth member of the Trinity.

  Fifty-six years later, the emperor Theodosius finished what Constantine had started; for while Constantine had allowed the worship of the old gods to continue, his successor proclaimed himself their enemy. In A.D. 393 Theodosius attended the chariot races at the Olympic Games, declared himself the victor, and then abolished the games altogether; they would not be convened for another fifteen centuries. Theodosius cast down the altar of Victory in the Senate House in Rome and extinguished the eternal flame in the Temple of Vesta. The Delphic oracle was silenced; the Parthenon was vandalized; and in Alexandria the emperor’s agents split open the head of the god Serapis, revealing not the residence of a divinity but a secret cache of jewels jealously guarded by avaricious priests.

  Having demonstrated the empty vanity of the pagan idols, Theodosius had them all brought to the Hippodrome of New Rome. On the raised spina that ran down the middle of the racetrack he erected an obelisk from Luxor, made two thousand years before by the pharaoh Thutmosis. It was joined by the column of brazen serpents from Delphi, made by the Greeks in the dawn of classical antiquity, and by the statue of Athene Parthenos captured in Athens. Among all these treasures was a bronze quadriga that, some said, had been taken from Nero’s arch, or from Augustus’s mausoleum in Rome.

  Trapped on the spina, an island surrounded by a sea of sand and careering charioteers, these obsolete idols were captives on display: the booty of an old order that had been looted by a new one. But although the empire and the emperor were Christian, and laughed in the face of idolatry, they were a little frightened of their art collection. It represented the civilization that had mothered them; and over time, as that civilization disappeared from view, they came to regard their statues as the dwellings of demons, possessed of magical powers. The hoof of the bronze horse that supported the hero Bellerophon concealed, they said, the image of the future destroyer of Constantinople, while the colossal statue of Justinian hid a hoard of priceless jewels that would only be discovered on the day the city fell. There was a bronze snake whose magical power, they said, had cast out all the serpents of Constantinople, and a nymph atop a pyramid who answered to the call of the winds. These things were wonders; but they were also evidence that, in their fallen state, the Romans of Constantinople could no longer conjure the magic of their forefathers.

  FOUR HUNDRED AND fifty years after the iconoclasm of Theodosius, when Constantinople was a great and thriving city, Venice was as yet merely a marsh inhabited by humble fishermen. Humble they might have been, but every evening, as they watched the sun set over the world’s flat edge, they dimly re
membered that once upon a time they too had been Romans, and nobles at that. The Venetians had escaped to this lagoon when Huns had attacked their ancient city of Aquileia. It is said that they gathered the carved stones of their temples and rowed out with them into the water to evade barbarian capture. (Take a boat today to the quiet island of Torcello, and you can still see these carvings, built into crumbling cathedrals of a much later date.) Hidden amid the shallows and the reeds, they remained inviolate, beyond the reach of siege engines, archers, and cavalry. Floating on the surface of the waters, suspended between the horizons of the Orient and Occident, the Venetians answered to no one. Their dwellings were made of the clay they dug up from their muddy islets and baked into bricks; when these buildings fell into ruin, they dissolved back into the slime from which they had come and disappeared.

  Every morning, as they watched sun rise over the sea in the east, the Venetians dreamed of a destiny consonant with the greatness of their lost heritage. And so the people of Venice decided to steal themselves a past, in order to conjure themselves a future. They decided first of all to steal a patron saint, who would give them a pedigree, protect them from evil, and bring good fortune upon their enterprises; and they sent their boatmen out over the waters to find one.