The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (10 page)

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.

I
N
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.

L
ESS THAN TWO
decades 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.

In Which a Sultan Casts a Spell and
Moves the Center of the World

A R
OMAN
B
UILDING
S
EEN
T
HROUGH
M
USLIM
E
YES
Miniature commemorating Selim II’s renovation of Ayasofya
and his burial there. From Seyyid Loktun,
ehname-i Selim Han (1581).

The Parthenon might have passed into the insubstantial realm of dreams altogether had it not been turned into a church—dedicated first to holy wisdom, then to the Virgin—and afterward transformed into a mosque by the conquering Ottoman empire. Each time the function of the Parthenon was changed, the building was converted: the front door was blocked up with an altar, and the original altar removed to make way for a new front door. But as each successive conversion was laid over the last one, the hold of Athene over the Parthenon was enriched, for she was the virgin goddess of wisdom with a figure of Victory in her hand.

The people of the Dark Ages did not just vandalize the architecture of antiquity; they also turned it to new uses. When the barbarians came to Rome, they did not simply sack it; indeed, the buildings they encountered were often too solidly built to demolish. But having no use for theaters, temples, and fora, they turned them into fortresses for their warriors, prisons for their captives, and enclosures for their cattle.