The Horses of San Marco

I still get the shivers when I look at this photograph of the four copper horses located inside the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.  They are so lifelike, I swear I saw one flinch and another snort.  If they had jumped over my head and pranced out the church, I would not have been the least bit surprised.  Seeing this quadriga was, without a doubt, a very magical moment.

As a work of art, this sculpture is magnificent, but the journey these animals have made through history is an example of the power art can hold over men.  During the Fourth Crusade, the Venetians took them from the Hippodrome at Constantinople as payment for "services rendered" and hauled them back to a warehouse where they were stored for the next fifty years.  The doge finally had them installed on the terrace of the facade of St. Mark's in 1254.   Here they stayed to keep watch over the city for another 500 years until another conqueror claimed them as his.  A history of theft was repeated.

In 1798, Napoleon marched into Venice and took these horses, as well as priceless paintings and manuscripts, as payment for "services rendered."   Off they went to live in Paris atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.    When Napoleon's empire collapsed, however,  they were sent back to Italy where they have remained ever since.   In the early 1980's, the horses were removed from the terrace and brought inside to protect them from further damage.  The guidebooks tell you they were replaced by exact replicas, but trust me, there's no comparison.

But where was their first home?  Scholars are still debating whether they were Roman or Greek.  They do know that the copper content probably makes them Roman in origin, which makes me think ending up in Venice may be their real home, after all.