ABSTRACT
I am not the first person for whom these words encapsulate the ambiguities of Venice: its breath-taking beauty built on violence, its opulence as assertion of power, its artistic creativity exercised in a celebration of death. When my partner and I visited the city recently, we were repeatedly drawn back to the golden glow of the mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco, to the delicate stone tracery of the Doge’s Palace, to the water of the canals lapping gently at the ancient pastel houses. It is easy to fall in love with Venice, impossible to resist its beauty and the creative energy that achieved such magnificence. It is easy, too, to be drawn into the religious validation of its beauty. Was
not San Marco built to honour the evangelist and blessed by the miracle of the rediscovery of his bones on the occasion of its dedication? Does it not tell all the stories of the Bible in its glowing mosaics and innumerable sculptures and ornaments? And was not all this wealth achieved and celebrated in the defence of Christendom against the Muslim ‘infidel’? But with those questions the ambiguities can no longer be avoided. If
there can be no doubt of the intermingling of religion and beauty in the making of Venice, neither can it be denied that their interconnection is an assertion of power. The wealth that built San Marco was not innocently acquired. Much of the gold, silver and marble came from Byzantium and the Arab world, sometimes through friendly trade but often as tribute or plunder in the looting that characterized the Crusades. The four great bronze horses that stand above the main door of San Marco were taken as booty in the sack of Constantinople. An intricately carved pillar, probably a work of sixth-century Syrian art, was looted from Acre in Palestine. Even the relics of St Mark which the Basilica was built to house had been smuggled out of Alexandria. San Marco exists because of warfare, plunder, and violence, and stands as an assertion of power: it was from the first the Doge’s
chapel, the place of state where soldiers and sailors were given divine blessing and validation at the start of their expeditions. At whose expense is this beauty? My discomfort increased as the gendered nature of the power of San
Marco became more insistent, its masculinity implicit and explicit in the carvings and mosaics. By far the greater number of portrayals are of men, ranging from elegant marble renditions of Christ and the evangelists to exquisite cycles of carvings representing Venetian trades and allegories of the months of the year. Where women are portrayed they are for the most part depicted as either submissive or seductive: Noah’s wife and daughters-in-law stand by their menfolk; holy women – perhaps nuns – lean towards Christ in the jewel-encrusted Pala d’Oro; the mosaics of the first pair show Eve presenting Adam with the fatal apple. The great exception is Mary, mother of Jesus, repeatedly shown in a golden glow of dignity, the masculine fantasy of virgin mother, an impossible ideal for actual women. San Marco is not unique in its depiction of gender inequality of course; the themes are repeated with variations in churches throughout Christendom. But should that make us less uncomfortable, or more? Moreover, the beauty and power of San Marco, as of Christendom more
generally, is deeply invested in death. The Basilica was erected to house the dead bones of the evangelist. Its treasury contains sumptuous reliquaries of gold and silver finely wrought and inlaid with priceless jewels, made to contain drops of the precious blood of Christ, or an arm or finger or skull of some venerated saint or martyr. In the glowing gold of the mosaics the themes of Christ crucified and Christ Pantocrator are inextricably connected: his death is precisely the basis of his power. And all points forward to a world beyond this one, a heavenly world of which this splendour is a pale reflection. The gateway to that world is death. There could hardly be a more telling instance than San Marco of the
complex interpellation of beauty, gender, violence and death as these themes have shaped and been shaped by Christendom. Its beauty draws forth endless wonder, but it is not innocent. The more its history and its symbolism is probed, the greater the ambiguities of creativity and violence. Perhaps it is particularly apposite for its contemporary impact that the enemy, the feared ‘other’ against whom the power of Venice was asserted, was Islam. Against this dreaded menace the whole force of church and state was arrayed, even while its wealth was derived in no small measure from its Crusades against the ‘infidel’ who served as the reason or excuse for the full assertion of its power. The dissonances of beauty and violence, creativity and an investment in
death, that characterize San Marco echo those which have resonated through Christendom from its earliest religious history. From the first words of the Bible as we have it today, religion in the West is linked with creativity and beauty that quickly gives way to violence.
