THE AMERICAN ART HISTORIAN ROBERT NELSON TELLS THE story of a visit to his father’s grave in a middle-American city in Texas. He made his way down rows of bungalows towards the cemetery, where his father’s remains lay under a marble plaque on a lawn not far from an oak tree. There was a gateway which marked the transition between the bustling world of the living and the more sober one of the dead. On top of it, he saw, were copies of the horses which he knew stood, many thousands of miles away, above the entrance of the basilica of St Mark’s. They were ‘the size of large dogs and made of some strange material, suspiciously synthetic in appearance’.
Nelson was shocked by their shoddy presence and reflected on what effect the owners of the cemetery might be aiming to achieve. Were they trying to make the entrance look grander, or somehow give it a higher status – in the way that lions were placed by the entrance to the New York Public Library? Or was this a means of celebrating ‘the key value of the local Texas culture’, the horse?
By now, having followed the horses through their varied history, we can hardly be surprised by their appearance in yet another display. We live in an age where cultural icons are transferred from one context to another with bewildering rapidity. Most such icons, of course, are transient: a song lasts a month, a fashion in dress perhaps a year, an artist’s popularity among the cognoscenti perhaps ten. Yet in the horses we see icons that are still usable in a fresh context many thousands of miles away from their home two thousand years after they were made. What is the secret of their success?
There are some icons which survive because they represent a pinnacle of human achievement. The Egyptian pyramids are a good example. It is still virtually impossible to grasp that such vast and complex monuments could have been planned and put together in a pre-technological age. (So nearly impossible, in fact, that some fantasists have conjured up sophisticated vanished civilizations to which their construction is credited.) More difficult to assess are those icons which seem to evoke a satisfying response from the brain across time and culture – the Taj Mahal in India, or the symphonies of Mozart, for instance. The philosopher Plato would have been quite at home with this phenomenon. There is beauty on this earth, he said, and it provides us with a sense, albeit an inadequate one, of what the Idea or Form of Beauty, on its eternal plane of reality, might be. In fact, Plato argued, our souls retain a recollection of the Form of Beauty, and contact with great works of art – a Mozart symphony, or Giorgione’s nude Sleeping Venus – stimulates its revival. Nowadays we would be more likely to find the exploration of the underlying reasons for our brains’ responses to music and art being conducted by psychologists, wiring up their subjects to the sound of a Mozart symphony, rather than by philosophers; but there is no doubt that music can act to bring order to the mind. Art is psychologically satisfying for us at quite a profound and perhaps even universally shared level, and this explains why some works of art attract across cultures and time.
How central to the horses’ meaning is their aesthetic appeal? They cannot fail to have some impact. They are undeniably elegant. However, their ‘beauty’ has not been universally acknowledged, even if one discounts the prejudiced condemnations of Winckelmann (the horses as decadent because they are gilded) and Haydon (they cannot be allowed to compete with his beloved Parthenon marbles). The height of their popularity as art came during the Renaissance, when they benefited from the adulation bestowed on all classical art. Nowadays we are more cautious in adopting so idealized a view of the classical past; but even if we do not follow Renaissance taste uncritically, the horses are still remarkable – for their aesthetic appeal, but also for their age, the quality of their casting, and the very fact of their survival when the vast majority of classical bronze and copper statues have been melted down.
In addition to any significance it derives from aesthetic power and antiquity, every icon has its own history, and here the horses score highly. They are easily recognizable as prestige items, were designed for public display and, above all, have proved transportable. This means they have been eminently usable as symbols of plunder and triumph. Certainly this is why they were brought to Venice, and later to Paris, and it may have been the reason why they were in Constantinople in the first place. They have benefited in particular from the settings in which they were displayed – the hippodrome, St Mark’s and the Arc du Carrousel, vantage points from which they have watched over an extraordinary panorama of European history.
These are far more than simply four horses taken as plunder. For fifteen hundred years, from 1000 BC to AD 500, a team of four horses represented status. (So much so that some emperors portrayed themselves with six or even ten horses, to push their status still higher!) In the Greek world the chariot drawn by four horses reinforced the role of the games, at Olympia and other sites, as aristocratic gatherings. The gods, and even the citizens of Athens in their most arrogant representation on the Parthenon frieze, travelled in quadrigae. In the Roman period a quadriga drew the victor in his triumph in Rome and quadrigae were adopted by the emperors as their symbol of eternal victory. So they are infused with meanings from the classical world.
In later centuries, however, the horses’ significance proved ambiguous enough for them to take on other roles. They could stand as a religious emblem, as ‘quadriga of the Lord’, and this could justify their position on a Christian basilica while at the same time, a few miles away in a fresco in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, Giotto could portray them as a symbol of pagan idolatry. Were they even placed on the loggia to endow the Piazza with the aura of a ceremonial hippodrome in which the doges asserted their imperial authority? Perhaps; but times moved on, and by the fourteenth century the horses had acquired a new role as a symbol of Venetian national pride.
If we are to understand the continuing success of the horses as icons, then, we must grasp that it is precisely because they have proved so adaptable to the history which they have watched evolve around them that their power has endured. Some reminder of this long history is to be found in an evocative nineteenth-century poem, ‘I Cavalli di San Marco’ by Giacomo Zanella.* In it, each horse speaks in turn, reflecting back on their past. The first horse remembers the great times when the bell of St Mark’s welcomed back thousands of ships from as far afield as Egypt and Scandinavia. The nobler citizens were brought back precious stones coloured with the sun of Asia to weave into their hair, and even the poor of the city could wear silk. The recollections of the second horse are more cultural. He has memories of Byzantium, the hippodrome, the theatres full of statues and the imperial palaces by the sea. Now, in Venice, there is the architecture of Palladio and Bramante to admire, and the great palaces of merchants. At the height of the city’s artistic achievement Titian could be watched walking among the admiring crowds, while humanists such as Pietro Bembo were to be seen deep in conversation.
The third horse remembers Venice’s political and naval power. He wishes he could have been with the doges on their expeditions to the east and at the great battles between Venice and the Turks. Even today, he goes on, the name of Venice is remembered from the Aegean to the Byzantine waterways. Although the flags of the city’s enemies are now destroyed, memories of their being dragged in as icons of victory still linger. Finally, the fourth horse reflects on how, on his return from Paris, he saw the yellow and black flag of Austria fluttering on the standards before St Mark’s. He turned his head away and could not even neigh until the moment he heard the crowd roaring for Manin. The people of Venice cannot be tamed and the virtue of the old days cannot be extinguished. Yet, if ever a challenge so great as that of Lepanto arose, he wonders, would the spirit of the lion of St Mark still be alive in the youth of the Adriatic?
For the time being the horses have lost their proud vantage point; but it is not impossible that they will be restored to the loggia of St Mark’s. In July 2001 Vittorio Sgrabi, the under-secretary for culture in the Italian government, announced that the scientific evidence that the horses had suffered from pollution did not stand up. The intricacies of decision-making in the Italian national and regional bureaucracies make immediate changes unlikely, but it is possible that the horses will one day be triumphantly presented yet again to the people of Venice.
In November 1966, freak weather conditions sent the sea surging through the openings into the Venetian lagoon. For some twenty hours, Venice was covered by 2 metres of water. As its inhabitants waited in darkness there were some who feared that the waters would never recede and that this was indeed the end of the city. Venice is fragile. Its population dwindled in the 1990s and it is continuously assailed by two forms of waves: those of the acqua alta, the floods, and those of the tourists whose daily influx now exceeds the number of residents. Its death has been predicted in almost every generation; an anxiety that it will crumble into the lagoon pervades its history. Yet somehow it endures. The horses, in their porous copper, are equally fragile – but they endure too. In Aldo Palazzeschi’s novel, Il Doge, published in 1967, Venice is in a state of collapse and at one dramatic moment the basilica of St Mark’s disappears, just as the Campanile had done in 1902. The doge appears on the balcony of his palace, attended by the four golden horses, and like a sun-god of old he disappears with them into the sky. When all else has gone, the horses are the saviour of the last remnants of Venice’s pride.