The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (29 page)

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.

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.

Arbe, Yugoslavia:
Rab

Astipalaia, Cyclades Islands:
Stampalia

Bocche di Cattaro, Yugoslavia:
Boka Kotorska; Gulf of Kotor

Boka Kotorska, Yugoslavia:
Bocche di Cattaro; Gulf of Kotor

Byzantium:
Constantinople; Istanbul

Candia:
Crete

Candia, Crete:
Iraklion

Canea, Crete:
Khania

Capodistria, Yugoslavia:
Koper

Cattaro, Yugoslavia:
Kotor

Cephalonia, Ionian Islands:
Kefallinia

Cerigo, Ionian Islands:
Kithira

Cetinje, Yugoslavia:
Cettigne

Cettigne, Yugoslavia:
Cetinje

Chalcis, Greece:
Khalkis; Negroponte

Constantinople, Turkey:
Byzantium; Istanbul

Corfu, Ionian Islands:
Kerkyra

Coron, Greece:
Koroni

Crete:
Candia

Curzola, Yugoslavia:
Korčula

Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia:
Ragusa

Dulcigno, Yugoslavia:
Ulcinj

Durazzo, Albania:
Durrës

Durrës, Albania:
Durazzo

Euboea, Greece:
Evvoia; Negroponte

Evvoia, Greece:
Euboea; Negroponte

Fiume, Yugoslavia:
Rijeka

Gulf of Kotor, Yugoslavia:
Boka Kotorska; Bocche di Cattaro

Hvar, Yugoslavia:
Lesina

Iraklion, Crete:
Candia

Istanbul, Turkey:
Byzantium; Constantinople

Ithaca, Ionian Islands:
Ithaki

Ithaki, Ionian Islands:
Ithaca

Kea, Cyclades Islands:
Keos

Kefallinia, Ionian Islands:
Cephalonia

Keos, Cyclades Islands:
Kea

Kerkyra, Ionian Islands:
Corfu

Khalkis, Greece:
Chalcis; Negroponte

Khania, Crete:
Canea

Kithira, Ionian Islands:
Cerigo

Koper, Yugoslavia:
Capodistria

Korčula, Yugoslavia:
Curzola

Koroni, Greece:
Coron

Kotor, Yugoslavia:
Cattaro

Laurium, Greece:
Lavrion

Lepanto, Greece:
Navpaktos

Lesina, Yugoslavia:
Hvar

Levkas, Ionian Islands:
Santa Maura

Lissa, Yugoslavia:
Vis

Methoni, Greece:
Modon

Modon, Greece:
Methoni

Morea, Greece:
Peloponnese; Peloponnisos

Napoli di Romania, Greece:
Nauplia; Navplion

Nauplia, Greece:
Napoli di Romania; Navplion

Navpaktos, Greece:
Lepanto

Navplion:
Napoli di Romania; Nauplia

Negroponte, Greece:
Euboea; Evvoia

Parenzo, Yugoslavia:
Poreč

Patrai, Greece:
Patras

Patras, Greece:
Patrai

Perast, Yugoslavia:
Perasto

Perasto, Yugoslavia:
Perast

Piran, Yugoslavia:
Pirano

Pirano, Yugoslavia:
Piran

Pola, Yugoslavia:
Pula

Poreccaron;, Yugoslavia:
Parenzo

Pula, Yugoslavia:
Pola

Rab, Yugoslavia:
Arbe
Ragusa, Yugoslavia:
Dubrovnik

Rcthimnon, Crete:
Retimo

Retimo, Crete:
Rethimnon

Rijeka, Yugoslavia:
Fiume

Rovigno, Yugoslavia:
Rovinj

Rovinj, Yugoslavia:
Rovigno

Santa Maura, Ionian Islands:
Levkas

Santorin, Cyclades Islands:
Thira

Scutari, Turkey:
Usküdar

Sebenico, Yugoslavia:
Šibenik

Segna, Yugoslavia:
Senj

Senj, Yugoslavia:
Segna

Šibenik, Yugoslavia:
Sebenico

Spalato, Yugoslavia:
Split

Split, Yugoslavia:
Spalato

Stampalia, Cyclades Islands:
Astipalaia

Tenos, Cyclades Islands:
Tinos

Thira, Cyclades Islands:
Santorin

Tinos, Cyclades Islands:
Tenos

Trau, Yugoslavia:
Trogir

Trogir, Yugoslavia:
Trau

Ulcinj, Yugoslavia:
Dulcigno

Usküdar, Turkey:
Scutari

Vis, Yugoslavia:
Lissa

Zadar, Yugoslavia:
Zara

Zakindios, Ionian Islands:
Zante

Zante, Ionian Islands:
Zakinthos

Zara, Yugoslavia:
Zadar