Читать книгу Monument Future - Siegfried Siegesmund - Страница 221

Saint Mark’s Basilica is the most important monument of Venice. Built as the private Ducal Chapel, it became the centre of religious life in 1806 when it became the town cathedral. Since its construction, the main altar of the Basilica holds the relics of the body of the evangelist, transported in 828 AD to Venice, by two sailors, Bono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello. The receipt of these relics prompted the initial building of the first Basilica, which was inaugurated two years later under the doge Giovanni Parteciaco. At the end of the 11th century, this was lavishly decorated with polychrome marbles but increasingly after the Fourth Crusade (1204), and has been restored many times up to the present day, with the continuous addition of altars and sculptures. At some point in the first half of the XIII century, likely after a strong earthquake in 1222, a ciborium was erected above the main altar (Wolters 2014: 145-6) with marble spoliated after the Latin’s 1204 sack of Constantinople. The ciborium has a square plan and an 152elevation of rectangular shape forming a four-sided baldachin that stands isolated in the middle of the presbiterium (Fig. 1). The vault is cross-shaped with external walls faced with marmor thessalicum (verde antico) (Lazzarini 1997: 324; Lazzarini 2007: 223–244); the covering roof holds six small stone statues, some of which are re-used from other monuments. The whole structure is supported by four marble Corinthian-style capitals made in Venice in the XIII century imitating Roman originals of the II century A. D. These are also gilded similar to the corresponding magnificent columns (Fig. 2) that are the subject of this study. The circumferential carving covers the length of the columns with the story of Christ (in columns A, B, and D, infra) and Mary (only in column C) (Fig. 3): according to Weigel (2015) they are Byzantine masterpieces of two different sculptors of the VI century, originally installed in an important unknown basilica of Constantinople: the master chiselled the front columns B and D, and his pupils sculpted columns A and B on the back.

Figure 1: The ciborium of the Saint Mark’s Basilica.

Historically, these columns have been wrongly identified as of oriental alabaster (for ex. Lorenzetti 1994: 188), often confirmed in publications by several scholars. This misidentification may be justified by the gilding still partially present on their surface, which has been subject to repeated protective treatments with natural organic substances leading to a full covering of their surface. On accurate macroscopic observation by the current authors, marble appeared to be the more likely material of these columns, tentatively identified as Proconnesian (Lazzarini 1997). Proconnesian marble was quarried in ancient Proconnesos, the present day Island of Marmara (Turkey) and is the marble of Venetian monuments (Lazzarini 2015). On a monographic collective study of these columns, it was possible to sample three of them, and submit the marble to archaeometric studies (minero-petrographic and isotopic, see below) that allowed identification of two of the columns to be of Dokymaean and/or Pentelic (Lazzarini 2015b: 59) marble. To determine the origin of the fourth column as well as to investigate the 153nature and stratification of the gilding and past treatments a new sampling was made recently.

Figure 2: Details of the four carved marble column: a) column A at the back and B at the front; b) column C at the back and D at the front.