"Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought within and made a part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city's supreme grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the Piazza S. Marco."
In his delightful "Italy," Taine, after declaring Venice to be the pearl of that country, not equalled by anything he has seen, says:—
"The admirable Piazza, bordered with porticos and palaces, extends rectangularly its forests of columns, its Corinthian capitals, its statues, its noble and varied arrangement of classic forms. At its extremity, half Gothic, half Byzantine, rises the Basilica, under bulbous domes and tapering belfries, its arcades festooned with figures, its porches laced with light columns, its arches wainscoted with mosaics, its pavements incrusted with colored marbles, and its cupolas scintillating with gold; a strange mysterious sanctuary, a sort of Christian mosque in which cascades of light vacillate in ruddy shadows like the wings of genii within the purple, metallic walls of subterranean abodes. All this teems with sparks and radiance. A few paces off, bare and erect like a ship's mast, the gigantic Campanile towers in the air, and announces to distant mariners the time-honored royalty of Venice. At its base, closely pressed to it, the delicate loggetta of Sansovino seems like a flower, so many statues, bas-reliefs, bronzes, and marbles, whatever is rich and imaginative of living and elegant art, crowd around it to adorn it...
"Like a magnificent diamond in a brilliant setting, the Ducal Palace effaces the rest.... Never has the like architecture been seen; all here is novel. You feel yourself drawn out of the conventional: you realize that outside of classic or Gothic forms, which we repeat and impose on ourselves, there is an entire world; that human invention is illimitable; that, like Nature, it may break all the rules, and produce a perfect work after a model opposed to that to which we are told to conform."
Ruskin's words rush out, and seem to tumble one over the other in their haste to express his seething thought:—
"A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into fine great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,—sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves and lilies and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.
"And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, 'their bluest veins to kiss,'—the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life,—angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth ... until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst."
In comparison with the above, how curiously commonplace was Goethe, with his very practical queries, when first he saw the Horses of St. Mark: "A glorious team of horses,—I should like to hear the opinion of a good judge of horse flesh. What seemed strange to me was that, closely viewed, they appear heavy, while from the piazza below they look light as deer." To me the mystery in which they are veiled is their chief attraction. We know that the brave old Dandolo sent them from Constantinople to be one of his most striking monuments.
In this temple porch,
Old as he was, so near his hundredth year,
And blind,—his eyes put out,—did Dandolo
Stand forth, displaying on his crown the cross.
There did he stand, erect, invincible,
Though wan his cheeks, and wet with many tears,
For in his prayers he had been weeping much;
And now the pilgrim and the people wept
With admiration, saying in their hearts,
"Surely those aged limbs have need of rest!"
There did he stand, with his old armor on,
Ere, gonfalon in hand, that streamed aloft,
As conscious of its glorious destiny,
So soon to float o'er mosque and minaret,
He sailed away, five hundred gallant ships,
Their lofty sides hung with emblazoned shields,
Following his track to fame. He went to die;
But of his trophies four arrived erelong,
Snatched from destruction,—the four steeds divine,
That strike the ground, resounding with their feet,
And from their nostrils snort ethereal flame
Over that very porch,
SAMUEL ROGERS.
We know that one of these horses was transported on the galley of Domenico Morosini, and that by some accident a piece was broken off of one of its hind legs, which fragment the Senate allowed the valiant admiral to keep as a souvenir of his experiences. He placed it on a console of the façade of his house at St. Augustine, where Sanuto saw it, as he tells us in his chronicles. We know of their journey to Paris in 1797, and of their return in 1815. We know that they weigh but a few pounds less than a ton each; but who made them, and where and when? We know that it is said that they were treasures of Alexandria, and were carried to Rome by Augustus after he defeated Mark Antony, 30 B.C. But who can tell what Cleopatra thought of them? We know that it is said that five Roman emperors placed them on as many triumphal arches in the Eternal City, and then Constantino took them off to the New Rome to grace his Hippodrome. But when all these sayings are said, who knows?