The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (7 page)

Every time the Parthenon is ruined, it takes a little longer to rebuild it, and the task becomes a little more difficult. This time it will have taken twice as long to ruin and rebuild the Parthenon as it did to build it in the first place. One day, all that will be left of the Parthenon will be fragments imprisoned in museums; copies by the banks of the Mississippi, the Kelaniya, the Thames, the Spree, the Forth, or the Danube; the drawings of Stuart and Revett; millions of fading photographs; and hundreds of written eulogies, from Thucydides’ to this one.

Then, liberated from physical being, the Parthenon will have become nothing but an idea, and at last it will be perfect.

In Which a Prince Steals Four Horses and an Empire

A S
TAGING
P
OST FOR
F
OUR
H
ORSES
The Hippodrome in Constantinople, from Onofrio Panvinio,
De Ludis Circensibus
(1600)
.

The Parthenon is a ruin because pieces of it were removed, leaving nothing behind them but a fading dream of perfection. Liberated from the building for which they had been made, these fragments were set to purposes for which they had never been designed. They became building materials for peasants, booty for soldiers, and art for dilettanti; but at the same time, they still carried something of the aura of their sacred origin. That was why they had been stolen in the first place.

The “Dark Ages”—the centuries between the end of antiquity and the resurgence of western Europe in the Renaissance—have often been imagined as an era of ignorance and vandalism. Their darkness is depicted in the silhouette of cathedral and forest that separate the architect from his vision of classical perfection in
The Architect’s Dream
.

But the Dark Ages form our only link with classical antiquity. What their inhabitants chose to preserve (and what to destroy) of their own inheritance has determined ours, centuries later. The “barbarians” of the Dark Ages were the capricious curators of a museum whose meaning we shall never fully understand.

The theft and reuse of antique fragments was a common practice in an age littered with the remains of a culture that it lacked the capability to imitate or surpass. The people of the Dark Ages imagined that the buildings of antiquity had been built by giants, and that the bronze images of gods and emperors that adorned them were the habitation of demons. They believed that the fragments they stole would lend the creations to which they affixed them something of the authority of a lost past.

So while the barbarians vandalized a great many antique buildings, they also created wonderful creatures out of their transfigured remains. Of nowhere is this truer than Venice, which, floating on water, had no architecture to call its own. In order to acquire one, the Venetians stole the architecture of others, in particular that of Constantinople.

Venice is a transfigured Constantinople; but Constantinople was a transfigured Rome once upon a time, and Rome was a transfigured Greece before that. The cycle of theft and the chain of borrowed authority go back to a time of myth, from which, perhaps, all civilizations seek their ultimate source of authority.

I
N
THE SEVENTH YEAR
of the revolution, there was a triumph in the capital of the republic. The procession wound its way through the streets from the city gate to the Field of Mars, where the spoils of victory were dedicated in the Temple of the Fatherland.

This was no ordinary triumph. There were no slaves, no barbarian chieftains, no cartloads of bronze armor or weaponry. Instead, the crowd was treated to the spectacle of camels, lions, and giraffes in cages, palm trees and other exotic plants in pots, and a collection of strangely shaped packing cases shrouded in dust sheets. There were few soldiers in evidence, and no laureled general led the procession standing in his chariot. Instead, his place was taken by a magnificent group of four horses.

Their manes and their tails were stiffly combed, their legs were raised in the posture of a dignified walk, and their heads were turned toward one another as if they were engaged in noble equine discourse. But their attitudes were fixed, and their skin flashed gold and green in the sun; they were not living horses but statues cast in bronze. After their dedication, the bronze horses, the lions, the camels, the giraffes, the potted palms, and the packing cases shrouded in dust sheets were taken to the treasure house of the republic.

As the procession passed them by, the mob shouted out the paean they had been taught to cry: “Rome is no longer in Rome. It is all in Paris!” For in 1798 Rome was no longer the seat of triumph, nor had it been for very many centuries; the treasure house to which the spoils of triumph were taken was the national museum of the republic, the Louvre. The spoils of triumph rolled into the courtyard; the packing crates were carried up the grand stairs and deposited in the Grande Galerie, where they were unwrapped in front of the impatient deputies of the people. From one crate, a clawing marble hand emerged, then an arm, and then a bearded face contorted with pain. As the boards fell away, Laocöon burst into view, knotted together with his sons in the fatal embrace of a serpent. The rough timbers of another crate were cracked open to reveal the smooth arrogance of the Apollo
Belvedere. A dust sheet withdrawn unveiled the simple modesty of Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna
, whose bored attendant cherubs gazed dispassionately at their new owners. A vast cloth fell to the floor at the foot of a sumptuous banqueting table at which, painted by the hand of Paolo Veronese, Christ attended
The Marriage at Cana
. One chest concealed the golden hoard of Bellini’s Madonna di San Zaccaria, attended by solemn saints in her niche of gilded mosaic, while another was smashed open to reveal an enormous winged lion of bronze, holding a book in his outstretched paw.

Gathered in the grand gallery of the Louvre were the treasures of Roman and Venetian art. The bronze lion was the lion of Saint Mark, the paintings the finest ornaments of the monasteries, the churches, and even the main council chamber of Venice. The
Sistine Madonna
had lately hung in the chapel of the pope in Rome, while Laocöon and Apollo had stood in the endless galleries of the Vatican. In the republic whose motto was “liberty, equality, fraternity,” the emblems of triumph were not slaves, nor piles of gold, nor martial trophies, but works of art, placed on display in a museum for the admiration of the people.

An arch was erected opposite the Louvre in the Place du Carrousel. The four bronze horses who had led the triumph were provided with a bronze chariot, and then they were placed on top of the arch, in memory of the occasion.

I
T
HAD ALL
happened before: as the triumphant French well knew, the bronze horses had presided over triumphs in the capital city of another republic for nearly six hundred years. Every year on Ascension Day the doge would go from his palace to the basilica of San Marco, which was his chapel and the treasure house of his republic, to celebrate the triumph of Venice. He would kneel before the Pala d’Oro, an altarpiece studded with gems and glistering with gold, beneath which were buried the wonder-working relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist himself. Above the doge’s head hung five domes arranged in a Greek cross. They were covered in mosaics that, sparkling in the twilight, narrated the story of the republic and the saints and the angels that guarded it.

Then the trumpets would sound, and the doge would emerge from the darkness of San Marco into the sunlit piazza outside. He would proceed down to the water between two granite columns, on top of which were mounted the two patrons of Venice: Saint Theodore standing on his crocodile and Saint Mark represented in the form of a winged lion. The doge would board his ceremonial barge, the
Bucintoro
; and he would sail through the lagoon and out to the open sea, where he would cast a golden ring into the water to reconsecrate the marriage of Venice to that element.

Having consummated the union, the doge would return to San Marco and stand on a balcony over the basilica’s west doors. Above him were gilded kiosks crowded with countless carved saints; beneath, an arcade lined with sheets of precious green and red marble, set here and there with sculptures of Hercules and the caesars of old. And from the very heart of this facade, below the saints and above the basilica’s central door, rode forth the four bronze horses. Standing between them as if he were driving their chariot, the doge would review his citizens as they processed round and round the piazza below him. Dressed in a golden mantle and holding the insignia of his office, he was frozen in an attitude as rigid and regal as that of an oriental emperor.

I
T HAD ALL
happened before, of course, or at least that’s what the Venetians told their new French masters in 1798. The four bronze horses—and the gem-studded icons of the Pala d’Oro and the winged lion—had presided over triumphs in the capital city of yet another republic for eight hundred years. On the anniversary of the foundation of that city, the emperor would open a door between the Sacred Palace and the Hippodrome; and with his train of
magistri
, proconsuls, senators, priests, and relics, he would appear in gorgeous array in the imperial box before the citizens of Constantinople.

The Hippodrome was some fifteen hundred feet long, an elongated bowl of stone seats that, on those days, might be filled with a hundred thousand people. A raised barrier, the
spina
, ran down the middle of the Hippodrome, dividing it into two tracks. At one end the starting gates resembled a triumphal arch, while at the other
the track was curved to allow racing chariots to wheel around an obelisk.

The primary purpose of the Hippodrome was chariot racing, but it was more than a mere sporting arena. The Blues and Greens, which had started out as two different racing teams, had over time become powerful political factions that could bring the whole empire to its knees. The Milion, the pavilion from which all distances in the empire were measured, stood right by the gates where the chariots started their races.

The Hippodrome was also the treasure house of the empire. The
spina
and the starting gates were mounted with two obelisks and a whole menagerie of statuary: sphinxes, a column of brazen snakes twisted around one another, a colossal Hercules in bronze, an elephant wrought in the same material, a Nile horse with a scaly tail, a beautiful Helen of Troy, a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and many more besides. Among them were at least three—and perhaps more—
quadrigae
of bronze horses, with another tethered to a gilded chariot that was kept inside the Milion.