(peaceful music)
- [Steven] We're in the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
It's December, crowded with tourists
and it's a reminder that Venice has always been
an important crossroads.
- [Elizabeth] And we see it in the people
from all over the world that are in this piazza
and also in this magnificent basilica.
- [Steven] We're standing in front of the left portal.
It's surrounded by multicolored marbles
but at the top is this magnificent mosaic
that's 800 years old.
- [Elizabeth] The mosaic depicts the arrival
of an important relic to the city of Venice.
A relic is, in this case, the remains
of an important saint, Saint Mark
who was one of the Evangelists,
one of the closest followers of Christ.
And his relics, his bones,
ended up in the city of Alexandria
where he had been preaching
and the Venetians famously stole those relics
in an act of sacred theft
and brought them to Venice
and this put Venice on the map.
Saint Mark quickly became one of the patron saints
of the city.
The principle saint because he was one
of the evangelists.
- [Steven] And it conferred on the city,
a degree of spiritual prominence.
- [Elizabeth] There were actually cities
that had greater prominence in the region
and it wasn't given that Venice was going to become
the city it is today.
Acquiring these relics set them on that the path.
- [Steven] Now the mosaic that we're looking at
is a last survivor of what was originally a series
of four that went across the entire front of the church.
- [Elizabeth] And we are fortunate to have evidence
of what the other three looked like
through a painting that survives by Gentile Bellini
and he painted this facade in such detail
that we can tell what has gone missing.
- [Steven] So in the rightmost portal,
we would've originally seen the body being retrieved
from its sanctuary.
- [Elizabeth] So they smuggled it away on a ship,
they were tossed at sea and saved by these precious relics
that were miracle working
and eventually brought them to Venice,
gave them to the doge who was the ruler of Venice
and he proceeded to built a beautiful chapel
in their honor.
Essentially a reliquary, a container
for these precious objects,
and that church is the Church of Saint Mark
that we're looking at today.
Over the next few centuries,
this church was replaced several times
and it has an incredibly rich facade that was added
to it even later so this is an accumulation of things
and this is important
because Venice was very much about accumulating.
They were a merchant city
and they made their livelihood through trade.
Through bringing things from far away,
especially from the East,
and bringing them back to this city
that they were just trying to establish.
- [Steven] Well, we're looking at a mosaic
and that recalls immediately
one of the principle forms of art
of the Byzantine Empire,
that is of the Christian East,
and Venice as a whole has really been shaped
by its relationship with the East.
- [Elizabeth] The city of Venice didn't develop
until much after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The story is that it was founded by refugees
who were fleeing invaders from the north.
It's not a heroic tale.
So the Venetians really sought
not only their fortune in the East
but also a bit of their history.
They tried to associate themselves
with this rich tradition of eastern Christendom.
The Byzantines were the heirs
to the Romans and the Venetians wanted
to style themselves as heirs to the Byzantines.
In that way, they were connecting themself
also to Rome which was the fundamental point
of identification for any city on the Italian peninsula.
- [Steven] When I look at this church,
I see so many forms that don't seem to belong together.
Almost simple a collection of individual items.
- [Elizabeth] And in a way that's what it is.
What you're noticing is, I believe,
a very conscious attempt to make that accumulation evident.
The builders made it very clear
that these things were taken from somewhere
and put here and this is making a point
about Venice and its source of its strength
and the source of its wealth.
- [Steven] Venice is a small collection of islands,
basically marshland, in the middle
of a large lagoon.
- [Elizabeth] One of the only advantages Venice really had
from its location was the sea
that served as a natural protection
so it is a city without walls
but other than that it really had to struggle.
It didn't have natural resources.
It didn't have land in which to build wealth
so everything came from abroad
and the Venetians are very proud of that.
And this story is replayed on this facade in many ways.
We've talked about this mosaic
as a series of four narrative episodes
that move from right to left
and in that progression we see a movement of this relic
from east to west and the makers
of this mosaic were very conscious in reminding us
of where we are at each moment
so the missing mosaic that showed Alexandria featured
the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria,
one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
and when we arrive at that final portal,
we see the church that we are standing in front of.
Of course it's important to remember
that this church did not exist
when Mark's relics arrived.
- [Steven] So if Mark's body was imported
so was everything else here.
So was all of these marbles
and most famously, many of the most precious elements
of this building were brought from Constantinople,
the capital of the Byzantine Empire as a result
of the Fourth Crusade.
- [Elizabeth] The most famous of these are the four horses
that stand on the facade.
Today we see copies of them.
The originals are inside to protect them
but they come from Constantinople
and possibly before that from Rome.
They're the most famous of these spoliated
or stolen and repositioned objects.
In addition to all these materials on the exterior,
the Venetians put many of the things they took
from abroad from Constantinople, from the Fourth Crusade,
and other raiding activities.
They were very much
a warring republic expanding their empire,
put them in the treasury, and they announced
the presence of these goods
on the exterior of the treasury
with this beautiful wall of displaced pieces of marble
that make this sort of puzzle of colors
and patterns that clearly don't come from one place.
Don't try and create a unified facade.
Art historians have long thought
that most of this material comes from the Fourth Crusade.
More recent studies have shown
that maybe these materials come
from a variety of places and one other idea
to keep in mind is
that the Venetians were always fabricating their own legend
so it really worked to their advantage
to claim that all of these things came from Constantinople
so we don't know where a lot of these materials came from.
We know what the Venetians wanted us to believe
and we have to be really careful how we interpret these.
- [Steven] But now they're here
and once in Venice, they took on a different meaning.
They began to represent the power and extent
of the Venetian Republic.
Venice's triumph must've been so bitter for the Byzantines.
- [Elizabeth] In fact, a deacon and a patriarchal official
in Constantinople wrote very bitterly
about what he saw in Venice.
He wrote, "The objects there were very precious
"and very rich indeed, studded with priceless stones
"of exceptional size and clarity.
"These objects were brought here according
"to the law of booty right after the conquest
"of our city by the Latins
"and were reunited in the form of a very large icon.
"Among the people who contemplate this icon of icons,
"those who own it feel pride, pleasure,
"while those from whom it was taken
"see it as an object of sadness, sorrow, and dejection."
- [Steven] So this church and the objects
that it holds could be celebratory
but for others deeply sad.
Speaking to victory to some but also speaking
to the vanquished.
(upbeat music)