Fenlon - Piazza San Marco

PIAZZA SAN MARCO

IAIN FENLON has a chair in the history of music at Cambridge where he is a Fellow of Kings College. He has taught widely in Europe and the United States.

ALSO BY IAIN FENLON

The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy

WONDERS OF THE WORLD

IAIN FENLON

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
Exmouth Market
London ECIR OJH
www.profilebooks.com

This eBook edition published in 2010

Copyright Iain Fenlon, 2009, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 197 6

For Maria-Jos

Thank God I am here! It is the Paradise of Cities.

John Ruskin, Diaries

The Piazza San Marco is the most famous and most instantly recognisable townscape in the West, if not the world. Artists have painted it, travellers have described it, poets have grown lyrical over it and architectural historians have established its evolution from a medieval field ringed by buildings to the heroic space that we know today. Although there are few books devoted exclusively to the square and its history, there are many which touch upon it in some way or other. What follows is different from most of the existing literature in that it attempts to consider the Piazza as a coherent whole, a vibrant and constantly changing public space that is related both dynamically and organically to the buildings which frame it. In this important sense the Ducal Palace, the Basilica, the Campanile (bell tower) and the other buildings with which we are so familiar not so much frame the square but are situated within it.

Understanding the Piazza in all its dimensions, social and anthropological as well as historical and architectural, is inevitably compromised if this ensemble is divided (as is the wont of most histories and guidebooks) into a series of individual structures, each marvellous in its own right but also functionally separate. By relating the buildings both to each other and to the space of which they form a part, a different narrative emerges in which the square evolves as the cultural and political centre of Venice itself, the ultimate Piazza located at the centre of a once-great empire. A particular feature of this story, conceived as a sequence of narrative moments, is to put back the sound whether the shouts of market traders or the singing of the choir of the Basilica into the square, to bring it back to life as the focal point of the life of the city and its inhabitants. Considered as the site of everyday activities as well as a theatrical arena for the staging of the great civic and religious ceremonies of the Republic, the Piazza takes on a richer set of meanings beyond those of an inanimate, frozen architectural ensemble.

The starting point is the patron saint of Venice, Saint Mark the Evangelist. At its eastern end, the square is dominated by the Basilica dedicated to him, begun in 1063 and finally consecrated thirty years later. Embellishment with marble and mosaics, both internally and externally, continued long after this date, famously so in the case of the faade, which in its current over-restored condition is substantially a nineteenth-century creation. Many details of the external decoration, including sculptured panels, columns of marble and porphyry, and figured reliefs, came from the shiploads of loot shipped to Venice during the Fourth Crusade of 11991204. Most spectacular of all are the famous four bronze horses (now replaced by copies) displayed on eight short columns of white marble and four of porphyry, raised triumphantly on the loggia above the central portal of the Basilica, dramatically set against the dark central window. This prominent placing was the result of a political decision designed to emphasise not merely their beauty, but also their status as quite exceptional spoils of war, symbols of Venices newly formulated imperial mission and of its recent status as a major commercial power at the beginning of the thirteenth century.