Thoroughbreds from Venice

By ROBERT HUGHES

The San Marco horses at Manhattan's Metropolitan

One of the dirtiest political deals in history was made in 1202, when the Venetian Republic agreed to ship the Fourth Crusade to the Holy Land to conquer the infidel. An army of some 35,000 men, including hairy Prankish thugs as well as idealistic Catholic knights, assembled on the Lido, but no ships appeared; the Venetians wanted more money for the transport job. After months of delay and misery, the deal was made: as part of the fare, the Crusaders agreed to make a detour on their way to Palestine to seize Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, so that Venice could plunder it.

Under the fearsome Doge Enrico Dandolo, the armada sailed and, by April 1204, the greatest city in the world lay prostrate; in an act of unparalleled treachery, the most powerful Roman Catholic state in Italy had destroyed its religious rival, the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Tremendous booty was brought back from Constantinople to Venice. So thorough was the stripping that the soldiers even destroyed icons to get their gold leaf; 200 years later, when the last of the Byzantine emperors made a pathetic state visit to Venice, a shrewd onlooker noticed that the jewels in his crown were all paste.

Among the bullion, jewels, plate, rare marble and statuary the fleet brought back, the most celebrated work of art was a group of four antique gilt-bronze horses that Dandolo gave to his republic. They were hoisted, as supreme emblems of conquest, onto pedestals above the entrance to the San Marco Basilica. There they remained for some 750 years, except for a period when they were stolen by Napoleon, and when they were taken down for safekeeping during the two World Wars. Today the horses of San Marco remain the most famous bronzes to survive from the ancient world. But fame does not immunize bronze against pollution, and so to save the horses from the ravages of the fallout from the industrial center of Mestre in Venice, they have been taken down from the church. They will be put in a museum and replaced, on the basilica's fa&#amp;231;ade, by carefully copied understudies.

One of the four horses has been sent traveling again and may now be seen sumptuously installed, together with an admirable group of other bronzes, carvings and drawings of horses, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Horses of San Marco," which remains at the Met until June 1, is an exemplary show. It is full of insights into one of the great images of antiquity and the Renaissance, Equus seen as a symbol of the transactions between nature and culture. The show also demonstrates how the influence of the animals in Venice has survived for more than seven centuries, in copies, studies, models and full-scale figures ranging from medieval miniatures to Antonio Canova's design for a monument to George Washington.

No sculptures from the ancient world have been more exhaustively studied, analyzed, Xrayed, measured and probed than the San Marco horses, but it is still not clear when they were made, or by whom. Certainly they are not, as was once supposed, works by Lysippus, the great Greek sculptor of the 4th century B.C. Current opinion puts them much later, in the 2nd century A.D., and considers them Roman, not Greek. If so, the horse at the Met is roughly contemporary with the finest of all Roman equestrian bronzes, the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol in Rome.

As sculpture, the San Marco horses do not really equal the massive, noble modeling and sheer formal energy of the Marcus Aurelius. The curves of the horse at the Met are almost languid, its transitions smoother, the sense of muscular tension and vigor less commanding. But it is still magnificent, even in comparison with the other sculptures at the show; among these is a bronze horse's head from the Florence Archaeological Museum which, with its flaring, taut musculature, rhythmic neck folds and elegantly articulated mane, is the very essence of forceful Hellenistic realism.

The image of the hero on horseback --human intelligence bending brute nature to its command--was central to Renaissance art, and its main antique prototypes were the Marcus Aurelius, an equestrian statue in Pavia called the Re-gisole (long since destroyed) and the San Marco group. Almost all the major artists of the Renaissance, from Pisanello in the 15th century to Giambologna in the 16th, consulted the Venice horses; when Leonardo da Vinci was faced with the problem of designing a horseback monument to the Milanese warrior Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, he took them as his starting point, varying their massive poses and calm, advancing gait in numerous drawings, five exquisite examples of which are in the Met show. Only when the 17th century--under the influence of Rubens and Bernini--demanded more intricate, twisting, rearing, active poses for the horse in art did the pervasive influence of these creatures decline. Yet even then it was soon to be revived in the 18th century by the great Venetian neoclassicist Antonio Canova.

What this show presents, therefore, is something more than a Thoroughbred stable: it is a cross-section view of the growth of one of the fundamental visual images of Western culture. One can only admire the elegance, tact and precision with which the Met and the Italian scholars involved in this delectable project have mounted it. --Robert Hughes

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