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

by Edward Hollis

  At that time Alexandria was in the sway of the Fatimid caliphate; but two merchants of Venice, by the names of Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, went to the city and found an old church dedicated to Saint Mark the Evangelist. Saint Mark had been martyred in Alexandria, and his remains had been kept in this church ever since. The two merchants spoke with the guardians of the saint. They were in danger, these priests said, for the governor of Alexandria intended to demolish their church and send its marbles and columns to the caliph’s new palace in Babylon. The two merchants of Venice offered to conceal the body of the saint until the peril had passed, and the holy fathers agreed with gratitude.

  One night, under the cover of darkness, the priests let them into the church. Torcello and Malamocco took the body of Saint Mark and substituted it with the body of another, less exalted martyr, Saint Claudia—although legend does not relate how her body had been acquired. They put the relics of the more venerable saint into a wicker basket, and they covered them with joints of pork, so that the Muslim soldiers who guarded the city would not investigate what was apparently a container of defiled meat.

  But the merchants had no intention of returning the body of Saint Mark once the danger had passed. Instead they made their way to the docks and loaded the wicker basket with its sacred contents onto their galley. As they cast off, it is said, a sweet smell started to emanate from the shrine of Saint Mark. The people of Alexandria ran to the shrine to see—or smell—what was going on; but they were fooled by the bones of Saint Claudia. The priests’ lips were sealed, and everyone went back to their homes, while the Venetians slipped away to sea. Thus did Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello steal the body of Saint Mark from under the noses of the Alexandrians.

  A modest church was built in Venice to house the remains of the saint, the stolen patron of a city that had been stolen from the sea; but when this first church burned down in 976, the Venetians decided to replace it with something altogether more ambitious, and once again they looked east for inspiration. The new basilica of San Marco was built in imitation of the church of the Holy Apostles, which stood next to the Hippodrome in Constantinople. This church was known as the Heröon, because it had been built by Constantine, the founding hero of the city.

  The Heröon that the Venetians made for their stolen founder followed precisely the form of the original. It was fashioned in the form of a Greek cross surmounted by five graceful domes. The domes were supported on heavy brick arches and piers that were themselves pierced by smaller domes and arches, as if the church were a series of microcosms nestled inside one another at ever decreasing scales. It was surrounded by arcades that opened onto the muddy space outside, facing the castle of the doge.

  This church took some fifty years to build, and when it was finished the doge and the patriarch and the people marveled at the lofty vaults and fine pavements. They sensed, though, that there was something missing. Then they realized that they had forgotten where they had stored the body of Saint Mark.

  The people wailed out loud at their loss, and they demanded a miracle from their forgetful masters. The doge Vitale Falier and the patriarch Domenico Contarini gathered them all in the new basilica, and they began to pray. For hours their chant and their incense rose into the domes, and nothing happened. Then, after a while, a sweet smell began to pervade the church. Suddenly one of the piers to the right of the altar began to shake, and the masonry began to buckle. With a crash and a roar an arm appeared, then a shoulder, a torso, and a head; and then the whole body of Saint Mark fell lifeless onto the pavement of the sanctuary. The doge Falier placed this body in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt, and the Heröon of the Venetians received its patron saint.

  The basilica of San Marco was now complete, but it was a bare sort of building, lacking in the ornaments that were surely proper to the shrine of the patron saint of a great republic. The Venetians knew what they had to do: just as they had sailed east and had stolen the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria, just as they had looked east and copied the design of his shrine from Constantinople, so they would sail east again to find the gold and the marble, the icons and the relics and the ornaments that would adorn their church.

  Now at this time there lived in Venice a blind man by the name of Enrico Dandolo. Once upon a time, Dandolo had been a merchant in Constantinople, but he had caused so much trouble there that he had been expelled from the city. Dandolo returned to Venice, having been blinded, he claimed, by the Byzantine Imperial Guard; and he nursed hatred and bitterness in his heart against Constantinople. From year to year Dandolo plotted how he might avenge himself on the city that had cast him out. His cunning and his determination raised him through the ranks of the state until he became the doge himself. Still he waited, and then one day an opportunity presented itself.

  In 1201, the pope had declared a crusade to reclaim Jerusalem for the faith. The Venetians, living as they did on the water, were unable to contribute knights or infantry, but they did offer to provide the fleet that would carry the crusading army to the Holy Land. “Give us 85,000 silver marks,” they declared, “and we will take the crusaders from Venice to certain glory.” The pope agreed, the Venetians started building their ships, and the knights of Europe left their northern manors behind and began making their way to Venice. By 1202 the ships were nearly built, but only a third of the thirty-three thousand promised knights had turned up. A savage rabble they were, and the Venetians did not permit them to enter the city but kept them encamped by the surf of the Lido until their group might reach the promised number.

  It never did, and the few knights who had come did not have enough money to pay the full 85,000 marks that the Venetians required. Things began to turn nasty, and it was at this point that Enrico Dandolo saw his chance. He made a proposal to the barbarians gathered on the beach. “You can purchase your fare to the Holy Land,” he suggested, “by acting as our agents along the way. You can fight our wars for us, providing us with the booty we require, until the 85,000 marks we need has been collected. Then we will take you to Jerusalem.” The crusaders readily agreed, and then they asked which infidel they would be sent to fight against. Dandolo licked his lips and told them: “the emperor of Constantinople.” Their faces fell. They had not come all this way to murder other Christians.

  The emperor of Constantinople at the time was named Alexius III, and he had risen to the purple by imprisoning and blinding the emperor before him, Isaac II. Dandolo, who knew what it was like to be blinded and cast down by the Byzantines, told the crusaders that they could attain merit in heaven by restoring Isaac to his rightful throne. They would gain additional merit, he said, if they were also able to place Isaac’s son on the throne with him, a different Alexius. This other Alexius, he said, would bring Constantinople into the fold of the Catholic Church, from which it had long been separated by doctrinal schism. And by this specious argument, Dandolo refashioned a crusade against the Muslim unbelievers in the Holy Land into a war of vengeance against his old enemy. The reluctant crusaders, stuck as they were on the windy sands of the Lido, unacquainted with the intrigues of the Levant, had no choice. They set forth in their ships, not for Palestine but for Constantinople.

  The people of that city heard of the Venetian plan, and they were terrified. Though their city was surrounded by gigantic walls and filled with priceless bronze statues, gorgeous sanctuaries, and gigantic palaces, their empire was not what it once had been, and their legions were small compared to the barbarian horde that was on its way to meet them. Riots and commotions disturbed the city, and it is said that a mob fell upon a statue of Athene and tore it to pieces because

  her arm and her gaze were outstretched to the west—the direction from which, any day now, the Constantinopolitans expected their nemesis to arrive.

  Then arrive it did. After nine months of byzantine politicking, awful cannonade, siege, parley, ecclesiastical council, and the deposition and murder of three emperors, including the very Isaac and Alexius they h
ad come to restore, the crusaders took possession of the city in April 1204. The first to the walls was Dandolo himself. He and his soldiers fanned out through the city, spreading terror wherever they went. Nuns were dragged from their abbeys and raped, children taken into slavery, monks and bishops alike executed. The crusaders ran to the Heröon, the model for San Marco itself, and they tore it to pieces, despoiling the bodies of the emperors within. They broke into the church of Holy Wisdom, stripped its interior of its astonishing ornaments and relics, and set a whore on the throne of the emperor. They went to the church of Saint Polyeuktos and ripped pilasters, architraves, and sheets of marble from the building, leaving a denuded shell behind them.

  The crusaders came in the end to the Hippodrome. The scholar Nicetas Choniates, who witnessed to the scene, later recalled how

  these barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not pass over the destruction of the statues standing in the Hippodrome and other marvellous work. They cut these into coinage, exhanging great things for small ones and things laboured over at great expense for worthless small change . . . For a few staters, and what is more, copper, they consigned these ancient and revered objects of the nation to the smelting furnace.

  And he composed a lament for the lost creatures of the Hippodrome, enumerating their wonderful artistry, the miracles they had performed, and their mythical antecedents.

  What the soldiers did not destroy the Venetians loaded onto their galleys and shipped away, leaving the crusaders behind to rule the city and the empire they had wrecked. Some treasures were lost at sea, some were sold along the way, but a great many made it to Venice intact. The booty was unloaded into the Arsenale of Venice and unpacked in front of the impatient deputies of the people. Fragments of architecture were lifted onto the wharf: capitals, architraves, and pediments of white marble, columns of red Numidian granite, and green onyx ripped from the shrines and palaces of Constantinople. There was a block of porphyry carved with the crude likenesses of the emperor Diocletian and his deputy caesars, and there were strange and wonderful fragments of bronze sculpture: a lion, a pair of angel’s wings, the cuirass of some ancient general, a crocodile, a disembodied head. Crates were prized open, and a rainbow shower of mosaic chips scattered across the pavement. Other chests revealed grisly relics: the head of Saint John the Baptist, drops of Christ’s blood in a vial, a nail of the Cross, pieces of Saint Lucia, Saint Agatha, Saint Helena, Saint Symeon, Saint Anastasius, Saint Paul the Martyr. There were icons, in which the solemn faces of saints peered through windows of gemstudded incrustation; and, of course, there was a quadriga of bronze horses.

  Over the ensuing years, all of these things made their way onto the basilica of San Marco, so that what had been an austere brick structure soon shone, and sparkled, and flashed in the sun. The sheets of marble, onyx, and granite from the churches of Constantinople adorned the outside of the building, so that the nakedness of San Marco was clothed in the borrowed raiment of vanished sanctuaries. The porphyry caesars were set into the corner of the basilica; beside them, two beautiful pilasters from Saint Polyeuktos acted as plinths for the heads of decapitated criminals. The facade of the church was set with reliefs of Hercules, and a head of the emperor Justinian was placed on one pinnacle on the southwest corner. The gilded icons were bolted together to make magnificent altarpieces, set with gems ripped from the bodies of the emperors who had lain in the Heröon. The saints’ relics were stored in the crypt, to be brought out on festival days. The brazen wings and lion were welded together to make the emblem of Saint Mark, while the centurion’s cuirass, the crocodile, and the disembodied head became the body of Saint Theodore; and these two patrons of Venice were placed on top of two colossal columns of Numidian granite, raised by the waterside to receive them. The bronze horses, of course, were placed high on the balcony over the main entrance to the

  church, as if they surmounted a triumphal arch surrounded by a great heap of precious spoils.

  IN 1792, TIME began all over again. The people of France deposed and executed their monarch and his nobles and declared the republic, in which all the former subjects of the king became free and equal brotherly citizens. The year of Our Lord 1792 they renamed the Year One. Then, having created the best of all possible worlds, they went out to bring their message to the less enlightened nations of Europe: the ramshackle duchies, republics, counties, and prince bishoprics of the old Holy Roman Empire.

  Of the republic’s free, equal, and brotherly citizens, none was more zealous in the service of his country than Napoleon Bonaparte. An Alexander, an Achilles—an Apollo, to be sure, in his own estimation, and a Nero in that of his enemies—Napoleon crossed the Alps and descended into Italy with dreams of glory. Genoa, Tuscany, Rome, and Naples fell before the revolutionary conqueror, but the Republic of Venice ignored the signs of its approaching doom. The Venetians even allowed Napoleon’s armies to cross their territory as they wrecked the ancient order of Italy. “Venice has always been here,” they said to themselves. “Venice answers to no one. Venice is a free city, suspended on the face of the water, floating between Orient and Occident.”

  Then, on 20 April 1798, a warship entered the lagoon of Venice unannounced, a French vessel named the Libérateur. The Venetian government, not in the mood for Napoleon’s brand of liberation, ordered its guns to fire on the ship, and they killed its captain. Napoleon was incandescent: “The murder of the commander of the Libérateur,” he declaimed, “is without parallel in the annals of the nations of our time.” He set out to avenge it. Within two weeks his forces were at the shores of the Venetian lagoon. Napoleon sent the Venetians an ultimatum: surrender their republic to the revolution, or see it demolished by modern artillery, against which the water between the city and the mainland would prove no defense.

  Once upon a time, the Venetians would have laughed in the face of such a provocation; but on 12 May the Great Council of the republic was called, which all the ancient families listed in the Golden Book were invited to attend. Few bothered. Many had already loaded up their boats and left for the mainland. The council did not even have a quorum, with only 537 members attending out of a necessary 600, and this sorry rump of an assembly voted by 512 to 20 to accede to Napoleon’s demands. Five members abstained.

  So ended the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The doge walked out of the council chamber, returned to his apartments, and handed his traditional phrygian cap and his ancient ring of office to his manservant. “Take them away,” he said. “We shan’t be needing these anymore.” The French forces were welcomed by the Venetian mob, which was delighted to have ousted the ancient oligarchy of the doge and the families of the Golden Book. They erected a tree of liberty in the Piazza San Marco, and they danced around it, singing revolutionary songs of freedom. They congratulated themselves that the old order was past.

  Traveling with the French forces on their campaign was the man who had become known as the “Eyes of Napoleon.” Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon was a connoisseur and a good friend of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine. At the triumphant entries into ancient cities, at peace conferences and the signing of treaties, he was always there, telling his master what to plunder, what to steal, and what to extort. Denon made sure that a demand for works of art—twenty paintings, in total—was included in the terms of surrender dictated to the Venetians. It was these paintings that were unwrapped in the Louvre on the day of the triumph of Year Seven.

  But the French liberators of Venice went much further than collecting pictures, for Napoleon was no mere connoisseur. The gilded barge of the doge was burned and sunk, the winged lion of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore’s crocodile were removed from their eminences. And then Napoleon sent his troops to the triumphal arch of the Venetian republic, the facade of San Marco, and removed the bronze quadriga that surmounted it. Denon had told him that these horses had once pulled the chariots of the emperors of Constantinople, of Nero, and of Augustus, even, perhaps, the chariot of Apollo himself.

  LESS THAN TWO deca
des later Napoleon had been deposed, and by 1814 his empire and its treasures were being carved up between the powers that had defeated him. Denon, by now the director of the Louvre, fought tenaciously for his collection. The treasures of the Louvre belonged to France by right of conquest, he said. And also: the treasures of the Louvre had been the property of states that no longer existed, he said, and therefore there was no rightful owner to which they might be returned. And at the same time: the treasures of the Louvre were and always had been the property of the once deposed, now restored, monarchy of France, he said; they had been in the Louvre since time immemorial. No one believed him, and the troops of the allies who had defeated Napoleon came to repossess what belonged to their masters.

  But to whom might the quadriga be returned? Not only had it been stolen many times over, but it had indeed belonged to states that no longer existed. Macedon, Rome, Constantinople, and even the Republic of Venice were no more.

  Still, to the city of Venice the bronze horses were returned. Their new overlord, the emperor of Austria, was good enough to be present at their restitution on the facade of San Marco, even though Venice was now but a provincial port in his vast empire. Soon enough, they were put out to pasture, as it were, in the diocesan museum. There, stabled inside, they are protected by a sophisticated security system, so that no one can ever steal them again.

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