He sits enthroned on a ducal seal and hands over his vexillum to the standing doge. By the time of Doge Pietro Polani (1130-48), Mark has replaced Christ as the dominus Mark himself portrayed on a coin, now in company with an enthroned Christ on the reverse. Two centuries after the arrival of his relics in Venice, was St. The earliest imagery was impersonal and generic, with a denaro of c.855-80 featuring the schematic facade of a church encircled with the inscription "Christe salva Venecias." Only in the period 1056-1125, more than A handful of coins and ducal seals bear mute, but eloquent, testimony to his upward trajectory in civic Mark took on an ever more politically determined role in state iconography. With the growth of a Venetian national church centered at San Marco, St. State church) and the later ones to imply antiquity and ecclesiastical authority (by claiming preeminence in conserving and continuing the ancient Christian past). It is thus probable that the first replication was intended primarily to claim political legitimacy (by emulating an imperial palatine model for the While two hundred years later she had become politically and economically independent. But it would be misleading to attribute both echo and re-echoes to the same motivations, for Venice was still closely tied to the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century, Still visible instance of a deliberate architectural archaism in Venice. The church is, in the view of Otto Demus, the earliest Contarini's architects would have been working with a remarkably serviceable model that was by then five hundred years old. Less ancient, but more pious tradition of early Byzantium. But Venice, without an equivalent Roman foundation to boast of, looked back once more to the The third church of San Marco around 1063 during precisely the same period that Pisa, a rival maritime power, began to build its new cathedral. It is surely no coincidence that the Venetian doge Domenico Contarini initiated construction on Reconstructed in the tenth and again in the eleventh centuries, on the model of the sixth-century Apostoleion of Constantinople (Plate II). Such a tendency has already been noted in the thrice-built church of San Marco, constructed in the ninth century, and The articulation of the urban environment.Ī major aspect of the monumental approach involved the fabrication of a web of visual allusions to an antique or early Christian past. This demand engendered strategies both textual and monumental, infiltrating chronicles and histories of the city and influencing Mark the Evangelist.įor another three centuries the Venetian sense of time and space would be dominated by the necessity to invent a civic past. Its extraordinary mode of settlement matched by its singular setting, itĬould now, moreover, trace its ecclesiastical authority directly back to apostolic origins in the person of St. John the Deacon thereby established a genealogy and an etymology for the second Venice: probably the only major city in medieval Italy that could not boast of a Roman foundation. Of praise." After these decided to establish their residence in these islands, they constructed some well fortified castles and cities, and in such a way they recreated a new Venice and altogether an excellent province. Eneti, although in Latin it has one more letter, is a name that derives from the Greek and signifies "worthy Thus they gave to these islands the name of Venice, from whence they came, and those who live in these islands today call themselves Venetici. Migration continued over the next century to eleven other islands in the lagoon: Addressing without apologies the delicate question of Venice's obscure beginnings, the chronicler goes on to explain that inhabitants of the first Venice, led by the patriarch of AquileiaĪnd carrying their most holy relics, sought refuge on the island of Grado at the time of the Longobard invasions in the sixth century. Thus begins the earliest surviving Venetian chronicle (Plate 10). John the Deacon, early eleventh century People, from what we know from their name and from the annals, draws its origin from the first Venice. The other is that Venice which is situated in the insular zone in the gulf of the Adriatic, where the water flows between island and island, in a splendid position, pleasantly inhabited by a numerous people. Its capital is the city of Aquileia, in which the Holy evangelist Mark, illuminated by divine grace, preached the gospel One is that of which the ancient histories speak, extending from the confines of Pannonia up to the river Adda. Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past
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