Back the imperial way – effects of empire –
falling into place – ethnics – out of the sun
at last
So we sail across the bay of Trieste to that glistening destination over the water, guided now if not by the actual flash of the sun on the summit of the great Campanile, as seafarers used to be, at least by the shining knowledge of its presence there. Many ships still sail up the Gulf of Venice to La Dominante: tankers taking oil to the refineries of the lagoon, freighters for the busy docks of the city itself, cruise-liners booming disco music, hydrofoils from Trieste, and now and then warships of the Italian navy, whose vessels are still the most beautiful of all, streaking lean and elegant, like the galleys before them, to anchor tonight off the Riva degli Schiavoni, the Quay of the Slavs, only a stone’s throw from the Arsenal.
We will return the imperial way too, through the sea-gate of the Lido, as the Crusaders did, and the bravos of the Cyclades, and Petrarch’s courier-ship from Crete trailing its captured banner, and poor Caterina Cornaro, and Morosini home from defeat and from victory, and all the countless argosies, galleasses, pilgrim galleys and troopships that returned, at one time or another during the long story of the Venetian Empire, triumphant or humiliated to the lagoon.
An abandoned but still glowering fortress greets us as we pass through the sea-gate, emblazoned of course with a gigantic lion of St Mark – the fortress of San Andrea, which was designed by that same Sanmicheli who built the walls of Zadar and Iraklion, and whose guns, by injudiciously firing on a French frigate in 1797, gave Napoleon the casus belli he wanted to end the Venetian Republic. Round the point we sail, into the calm waters of the lagoon, sheltered against the open sea by the long line of the Lido islands, and there before us resplendent in the morning, the sun glinting from its golden domes and baubles, from its forest of campaniles, from the periwigged presence of the Salute and the grand mass of the Doge’s Palace – there before us is the Serenissima once more. More than ever, now that we have travelled her lost dominions, does she seem an imperial city, stashed and gilded with the spoils, memorials and attitudes of the long adventure. She rules nothing in fact, being only one of twenty Italian regional centres, but she retains the charisma of command, and has hung on to the booty.
We disembark where Dandolo set sail, nearly eight hundred years ago, and the sense of permanent occasion is as exciting now as it was when we started. The Piazzetta remains a quay fit for princes or Crusaders. The chimerical winged lion, St Theodore with his despondent amphibian, welcome us back from their column-heads above the sea. Dandolo never came home from Constantinople, except perhaps as a bag of bones, but if he were to be resurrected now he would easily recognize the scene about him, and doubtless rejoice at the evident success of the imperial enterprise he launched. He was a terrible old man, but he loved his city and the city still loves him: there is a monument to him, in Latin, on his modest house near the Rialto bridge, No. 4172 San Marco, and from his day to our own there have always been Dandolos in Venice eager to claim him as an ancestor.
We are back where our journey began, but now we recognize the effects of empire all around us. Venice has not, like London, shrugged off the memory of its mighty mission. In an aesthetic sense at least, this city still holds the east in fee, as the place where orient and Occident seem most naturally to meet: where the tower of Gothic meets the dome of Byzantine, the pointed arch confronts the rounded, where hints and traces of Islam ornament Christian structures, where basilisks and camels stalk the statuary, and all the scented suggestion of the east is mated with the colder diligence of the north. Augsburg met Alexandria in these streets long ago, and nobody fits the Venetian mis-en-scène better than the burnoused sheikhs so often to be seen these days feeding the pigeons in the Piazza, leading their veiled wives stately through the Merceria, or training their Japanese cameras upon St Theodore like that contorted sightseer in the old picture.
Everywhere around us are the brags of empire – Venice, George Eliot remarked once, was ‘a creature born with an imperial attitude’. The Doge’s Palace is full of them, in huge allegorical studies of Venice Crowned By Fame, Sitting on the World with Lion, Surrounded by Virtues Receiving the Sceptre of Dominion, or in depictions more specific, like vivid reconstructions of the sack of Zadar, or Vettore Pisani taking Kotor in 1378. Outside, just beside the Porta della Carta, are the four little knightly figures, embracing each other in porphyry, which we saw the Venetians loot in Constantinople on page 40. Nearby are the ornamental columns from the same page and all around are the marble slabs like veined silk, the porphyry panels and the miscellaneous pieces of antique carving brought home from the Crusade as ballast.
The Piazza, when we look at it now, is pure empire. The very shape and scale of it bespeaks a consequence grander than any city-state’s: Napoleon’s finest drawing-room in Europe was really a lobby for the eastern Mediterranean. Tremendously out of scale above us stands the Campanile, no longer the one that Dandolo knew, for that fell down in 1902, but still recognizably a beacon tower as well as a belfry, upon whose summit the angel stands sublime beneath his halo, to salute the captains as they pass. On the loggetta at its foot Jupiter, playing the part of Crete, Venus personifying Cyprus, lie in attendance upon a Venice disguised as Justice: nearby are the three bronze flagpoles from which on State occasions flew, according to the current state of empire, the flags of Cyprus, Crete, Euboea or the Peloponnese. The great square all around is as crowded, as variegated, as endlessly entertaining and as wickedly expensive as ever it was in the days of dominion, when it was habitually frequented, we are told, by ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea’.
Presiding over it all, as ever, is the Basilica, no longer the Doge’s private chapel, nor even alas a state church, but still the seat of the Venetian Patriarchate, still the shrine of everything Venetian, and still an eclectic and magical jumble of many rites, anomalies and nuances of the Christian faith. Its façade seems almost to sag with the weight of the gold ornament, statuary, fragments of ancient art, grace-notes of marble and afterthoughts of architecture added to it since Dandolo’s day, so that its still graceful and airy outline looks as though it is straining to move, but is held down by the sheer weight of its magnificence. The shallow Byzantine domes of the thirteenth century have been covered with more bulbous cupolas now, giving it a much more eastern look, and upon each of these there is a device of golden frivolity, giving the whole a last exuberant touch of sparkle.
Into this inimitable building, over the eight centuries since we began our voyage, the Venetians have packed shiploads of loot. The treasury is a jackdaw’s nest of stolen reliquaries, chalices and sacred ornaments, bones, fingers, hair-locks and blood-phials of countless saints, exquisite altar-pieces from the lost churches of Byzantium, marvellous vestments and episcopal rings from Greece, the Aegean and the further east. The Zen Chapel, once the State entrance to the building, is supposed to be walled with the marble and verd-antique tombstones of Byzantine emperors. The Pala d’Oro, the great gold screen behind the high altar, with its 1,300 pearls, 300 sapphires, 300 emeralds and 15 rubies, is studded with the lovely enamels the Crusaders took from Constantinople, and in its centre the figure of the Emperor John II Comnenus, its original patron, has been metamorphosed into the Doge Ordelafo Falier.
In her own chapel to the north of the high altar is the Nikopoeia, that most holy prize of empire. If she served the Byzantine emperors well and long, she served the Venetian Republic better and longer. The Venetians adopted her, like the Byzantines, as their Madonna of Victory; before her image supplicatory Masses were held at the beginnings of wars, Masses of thanksgiving after victories. She was adorned by the Venetians beyond her original simplicity, and set in a sumptuous frame, but still from its recesses her lustrous eyes looked out, smoky but reassuring, to bless the admirals before they sailed, or congratulate the loyal condottieri.
In 1979 some of the jewels from the Madonna’s frame were stolen by a pair of young toughs from the mainland, who had concealed themselves inside the Basilica when it closed for the night, and rushed out with their trophies when the caretaker opened it in the morning, giving him as they passed, like janissaries at Nicosia, a valedictory clout on the head. The jewels were soon recovered, but I happened to be in Venice on the day of the theft, and went along to the Basilica to attend the Mass of repentance and supplication that the Patriarch immediately held. Never was history so poignantly played out. A profound sense of sadness filled the fane, nuns sighed and priests blew their noses heavily, as they mourned the desecration of that particularly cherished piece of stolen property.
Much in this city falls more easily into place, once you have travelled the imperial routes. What are those crumbled relief-maps affixed to the façade of Santa Maria Zobenigo, and why are they there? They are the fortresses of Split, Corfu, Iraklion and Zadar and they are there because members of the Barbaro family, patrons of the church, fought actions in all those places. What recumbent hero is this, high on the wall of San Zanipolo, attended by Roman soldiers? It is the fighting Doge Pietro Mocenigo, formerly Captain-General of the Sea, whom we met with his galleys at Cyprus on page 96, and whose epitaph is frank and simple: From The Booty Of Enemies. Does the funeral church of San Michele, on the cemetery island, look curiously familiar? It does: it is thought to have been based on Orsini’s masterpiece, the cathedral at Šibenik.
The remains of Morosini the Peloponnesian, brought home from Nauplia, He as you might expect beneath the biggest funeral slab in Venice, in the church of San Stefano, around the corner from the Campo Morosini. The remains of Pisani, victor of Chioggia, and Venier, victor of Lepanto, lie near each other in San Zanipolo, the first beneath a fourteenth-century stone statue, the second beneath a twentieth-century bronze. The remains of Jacopo Pesaro the Bishop-Admiral lie in his own family chapel in the Frari – he did everything in style, and close beside him is the marvellous altarpiece, showing the Pesaro family prostrate before the Virgin and Child, which he himself commissioned from Titian when his fighting days were over. Look hard at the tomb of Bragadino in the south aisle of San Zanipolo. It is surrounded by symbols of fortitude and virtue, lions winged and wingless, cherubs, coats of arms, and on its bas-relief is portrayed the general’s terrible end, his degradation before Ali Pasha at the gate of Famagusta, his flaying alive beside the cathedral in the city square. In the heart of the composition, though, is a small stone urn: within it there lies, peaceful at last, the hero’s poor scarred skin, brought home from Constantinople at such risk and sacrifice.
The greatest of all the winged lions, the one who must have roared the loudest through the storm at Methoni, stands guard above the gate of the Arsenal, the power-house of the entire imperial undertaking. He is attended by four wingless lions, all trophies of empire. On the far right is the now re-capitated lion which Morosini mentioned in his dispatch from Athens on page 134. On the extreme left is the lion who used to spout water from his mouth on the harbour-front at Piraeus, and who gave his name indeed to the Port of the Lion there: he is inscribed on his flank with a runic inscription, cut it is thought during some Grecian engagement by members of the Varangian Guard who protected the Byzantine emperors so formidably in Chapter Two.
The Arsenal behind them is a shipyard to this day. It has been greatly extended in the centuries since its foundation, but if you stand on the wooden bridge outside its twin protective towers, you may look inside to see exactly the dockyard from which, in the years of empire, the warships of Venice emerged with such phenomenal profusion. They sailed to the open sea beneath your feet, only pausing at the quayside commissariat, we are told, to be provisioned, victualled and armed for all the contingencies of the trade routes. Ships are still prepared for sea in there, and in an iron shed there very likely lies, being touched up for the next civic ceremony, the latest descendant of the Doge’s bucintoro, flash and grandiose as ever.
Here is the church of the Greeks, with its precarious leaning tower over the Rio dei Greci, and its attendant Hellenic Institute. It was to this nucleus of Greekness, founded by Cretans and Corfiotes, that the exiled writers, philosophers and theologians came, and it possesses a famous collection of pictures from the Veneto-Cretan school. Around the corner is the Scuola of the Schiavoni, the charitable guild of the Slavs. They were powerful in Venice, providing many of the workers of the Arsenal besides many sailors, and they commissioned one of their compatriots to decorate the building for them: Carpaccio the Istrian, whose exquisite fantasies of saints, cities, dragons and little dogs make the building one of the loveliest things in Venice.
You cannot evade empire in the streets and shrines of Venice. There are captured Turkish flags in museums, and great wooden models of colonial fortresses, and imperial pictures everywhere, and scattered across the city, it is said, are the bodies of fifty saints, and segments of many more, most of them brought home as imperial spoils, some snatched in the nick of time from the Turks – like the head of Athanasius the creed-maker, which we last came across at Methoni on page 116, and is now at rest in the imperial city. The best-remembered of the Doges are still those, like Dandolo, Morosini or Venier of Lepanto, who sailed with their fleets on their imperial ventures. The greatest of the Venetian artists were not above portraying imperial events. And we are not in the least surprised to learn that Bajamonte Tiepolo, whose attempted coup d’état in 1310 was thwarted by a stone mortar dropped on his standard-bearer’s head by an old lady in the Merceria – we are not at all surprised to discover that this villain had previously been in trouble among the colonials of Methoni.
The name of the Querini-Stampalia Palace, on the Grand Canal, is a reminder that many aristocratic Venetian families had colonial stakes: the Querinis were feudarchs of Stampalia in the Aegean. The name of the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, now the municipal casino, is a reminder that many a colonial clan made its fortunes in the metropolis – the Calergis were originally Greeks from Crete. The Natural History Museum, between the Rialto bridge and the railway station, was once the Fondaco dei Turchi, the Turkish merchant headquarters established here in 1621, in the lull between the loss of Cyprus and the Ottoman attack on Crete.
Few women figure in the annals of the Venetian empire (or for that matter of Venice itself) but the one tragic heroine of the tale, Caterina Cornaro, is certainly not forgotten in the city. Her last Venetian palace, now the Monte di Pietà, the municipal-pawnshop, is still called the Palazzo Cornaro della Regina (if only to differentiate it from the fifteen other palaces that perpetuate her family name). A day trip to Asolo, Caterina’s pastoral fief in the hills, is a favourite optional extra of the package tour. Caterina herself is assiduously pointed out by guides in Gentile Bellini’s famous painting, in the Accademia gallery, of a Miracle of the True Cross at the bridge of San Lorenzo: there she kneels, plump, pious and tightly stayed, on the edge of a canal with her row of waiting ladies. Caterina’s reception as Queen of Cyprus is portrayed in bas-relief in the church of San Zanipolo, where the keys of Famagusta are handed over to her on the tomb of her protector Mocenigo. Her corpse has been moved a few hundred yards down the street from the church of the Apostoli to the church of San Salvatore; but there, in her luxuriant funerary chapel, the sacristan still rolls the carpet back with a reverential flourish, to show you where the poor Queen lies, wrapped in her rough habit.
If you can read the imperial text in the substance of Venice, you can read it in the people too. Venice is never more herself than in the high days of the summer season, when the city is jammed to the last attic bedroom with its profitable visitors. This is how it was when La Dominante was still dominant. Today’s sightseeing hordes are yesterday’s pilgrims, itinerant traders, sailors, supplicants. The Hotel Danieli, the Pensione Accademia, the Youth Hostel on Giudecca are only successors to the hostelries which, in Enrico Dandolo’s day, occupied the whole southern side of the Piazza. Florian’s and Quadri’s, the cafés whose string orchestras compete so vigorously across the square, stand in the line of the shops which, in 1580, introduced coffee to its first European customers. The Biennale Festival of modern art, the Film Festival on the Lido, are natural descendants of the Great Whitsun trade fair of Venice, where the merchants of east and west met to exchange orders, display samples and indulge in industrial espionage.
There are Jews still in the ghetto of Venice, more prosperous now than they have been for generations, and their synagogues have been handsomely restored. There are still Greeks to worship at their church of San Giorgio. The Armenians, many of whom followed the Venetian flag step by step before the advance of the Turk, have their own island monastery, church and school – the chief Armenian Catholic school in existence, to which students come from Istanbul, Damascus and Teheran. Above all the Slavs, who did so much of the work of the Venetian Empire, are recognizable everywhere to this day.
In 1797, when the Republic was at its last gasp, a stout message reached the Doge from Dalmatia: ‘Put on your crown,’ it said, ‘and come to Zara!’ Later still it was Slav reinforcements from Dalmatia, sailing into Venice at the last minute, who offered the final chance of resistance to Napoleon: the Doge Ludovico Manin was much too frightened to use them, and indeed was terribly scared by the feu de joie which those loyal colonials fired in salute outside his window. By then Venice was half-Slav, and it remains hardly an Italianate city in the popular kind. Those thoughtful blue eyes, those hefty shoulders of bargees and market-men, come from the coasts of Dalmatia, so long the recruiting-grounds of the Republic; and the gondolier himself, the very herald of Venice, often has in his veins the sea-salt blood of Perast or Hvar.
There is another strain too, that one senses rather than notices: something subtle and evasive, a twist of courtesy, a wry shrug of the shoulders, to remind one that through it all, boldly though they flew the banner of the evangelist, proudly though they represented Christian civilization against the Turk, the Venetian imperialists were never out of touch, nor altogether out of sympathy, with Islam.
… her daughters had her dowers [so Byron wrote]
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers…
We will end with the most marvellous booty of it all, and the most moving (for the Nikopoeia, after all, failed to preserve the Venetian Empire as she failed to save the Byzantine, besides letting me down disastrously when I appealed for her support in the 1979 Welsh devolution referendum), more majestic than the lion of Piraeus (which looks, as a matter of fact, rather lugubrious and lick-spittle, like a blood hound), more dazzling even than the sheen of the Pala d’Oro, more touching than the little emperors, hand in hand in the Piazzetta. The four Golden Horses of Constantinople, the Stallions of St Mark, were the very epitome of loot, the very standard of national self-esteem.
In all recorded history there were no such imperial trophies as these. They were scarred by the fortunes of time and war. They had lost much of their ancient gilding. They were mounted wrongly on their gallery on the façade of the Basilica, in two couples instead of a single quadriga. But they were to remain for 800 years the supreme symbol of Venice, powerful but always magnanimous. If the winged lion stood for Venetian authority, the Golden Horse represented the generosity and constancy of Venice – La Serenissima, the Most Serene. When in 1379 the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria lay with his fleet at the very gate of the lagoon, he boasted that he would never leave until he had ‘bridled the horses of St Mark’: within the year the siege was lifted, Doria was dead and all his ships and men had ignominiously surrendered.
Whoever made the Golden Horses, the Venetians took them as their own, and they entered the sensibility of the city like no other images. Tintoretto included one as the charger of a Roman centurion, in his monumental Crucifixion. Carpaccio mounted St Martin on another. Canaletto took them off their gallery, in a famous caprice, and re-erected them on pedestals in the piazzetta. Poets from Petrarch to Goethe celebrated them: ‘blazing in their breadth of golden strength’, was John Ruskin’s vision of their presence up there, and Max Beerbohm said they made him feel common.
Through the long Venetian decline the horses remained unchallenged, for Venice was never invaded and never suffered a successful revolution. Only with the fall of the Republic in 1797 were they removed, for the first time in six centuries, and shipped away to Paris: there, after some years between the Tuileries and the Louvre, they were taken in procession, escorted by camels and wild beasts in wheeled cages, to be mounted on the Arc de Carrousel as the most marvellous of all Napoleon’s battle trophies (though he uncharacteristically rejected a suggestion that he might himself be added in effigy to the quadriga, driving a chariot).
They were returned to Venice after Waterloo, but their pride was never the same again, because Venice herself had lost her independence for ever. They had been bridled at last. Only for a few months in 1848, when the half-Jewish Venetian patriot Daniele Manin led a heroic but abortive rebellion against Vienna, did they recover their symbolic meaning: when Venice finally became part of the Italian kingdom, after the Risorgimento, they remained up there on their gallery as beloved friends, but never again as defiances. They were removed for safety’s sake in each of the world wars, and then in 1977 it was decided by the administrators of St Mark’s that they ought to be indoors, away from the fumes and the salt. To the sorrow of millions of lovers of the Golden Horses, it was decreed that they must be taken from their pedestals, restored, and kept for ever as museum pieces in the rooms behind the gallery.
There they are now, out of the sun at last. Through the door of their last resting-place you may see their forms, proud as ever, silhouetted against the half-light from the windows. Their hoofs are raised, as always, in a noble gesture of greeting, companionship or compassion. Their heads are turned still, fraternally towards each other. But the life has gone out of them at last, as the power and purpose have left Venice. The Venetians used to say that whenever the Golden Horses were moved, an empire fell – the Byzantine Empire in 1204, the Venetian Empire in 1797, the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, the Kaiser’s Empire in 1918, Hitler’s Empire in 1945. This their last move, though, is no more than an obituary gesture, a long farewell, a recognition that the glory of Venice has gone, and only the forms remain.
Four replicas are their successors, made of bronze in Milan. They are skilful copies, perfect in proportion, exact in scale, aged by a patina artificially applied. But they are lifeless things. They lack the bumps, the scratches, the suggestions, the mighty experience of the Golden Horses of St Mark. They never saw old Dandolo storm ashore at the Golden Horn, nor welcomed the great galleys, aflame with flags and profit, home from the seas of empire.