The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

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The Basilica di San Marco
The north and south facades
In the 1860s and 1870s an extensive and controversial restoration of the Basilica
was begun, a scheme which would probably have finished with the rearrangement
of the main facade. An international protest campaign, supported by Ruskin,
forced the abandonment of the project soon after it had reached the Piazzetta corner
of the west front, and the damage caused to that section was largely reversed
in later years. The north and south facades, though, were altered irrevocably by
the restorers, who replaced the old polychromatic marble panels with badly fitted
sheets of grey stone, creating an effect described by an English stonemason in 1880
as resembling “a dirty lime wash on a white plastered wall”.
The north side of San Marco, the last to be completed (in the first half of the
thirteenth century), is studded with panels from a variety of sources – they include
a seventh- or eighth-century relief showing the Apostles as twelve lambs, and a
tenth-century piece illustrating Alexander the Great’s mythical attempt to reach
heaven by harnessing a pair of griffons to his chariot. The entrance on this side, the
Porta dei Fiori, is thirteenth-century (the tomb of Daniele Manin is a bit further
on); and most of the sculpture on the upper part is by the Lamberti.
Jutting out between the south facade and the entrance to the Palazzo Ducale is
the wall of the treasury, thought by some to be a remnant of the first palace of
the doges and the chamber in which the body of Saint Mark was first placed after
its arrival in Venice. The screen fragments (plutei) set into the walls date from the
ninth to the eleventh centuries.
Sometimes the heads of freshly dispatched villains were mounted on the Pietra
del Bando, the stump of porphyry against the corner of the Basilica; a more
benign service was done on the day the Campanile collapsed, when it stopped the
avalanche of bricks from hitting the church. Its routine use was as one of the two
stones from which the laws of the Republic were proclaimed (the other is at the
Rialto). The stone was brought back from Acre in 1256, following Venice’s victory
over the Genoese there; the two square pillars near to it – Syrian works dating
from the fifth century – were filched from Constantinople during the Fourth
Crusade. High on the Basilica’s facade, above the two pillars, a thirteenth-century
mosaic of the Madonna is flanked by two lanterns that are kept perpetually lit, in
observance of the vow of a mariner who was led to safety across the stormy waters
of the lagoon by a light burning on the Piazzetta.
A number of tales centre on the group of porphyry figures set into the angle
of the treasury. Thomas Coryat tells a version in which four Albanian brothers
plotted against each other for possession of the cargo their ship was carrying, and
ended up poisoning each other. But the most popular version turns them into a
gang of Saracens who raided the Treasury and then contrived to murder each other
in a squabble over the spoils – hence, like the figures on the Torre dell’Orologio,
they’re often nicknamed “The Moors”. More properly they’re known as the
Tetrarchs, as in all likelihood they’re a fourth-century Egyptian work depicting
Diocletian and the three colleagues with whom he ruled the unravelling Roman
Empire – peculiar adornments for a church, bearing in mind Diocletian’s notoriety
as a persecutor of Christians.
The narthex
From the Piazza you pass into a vestibule called the narthex, which once, before
the partitioning of the baptistery and the Cappella Zen, bracketed the entire west
end of the church. The intricately patterned stonework of the narthex floor is
mostly eleventh- and twelfth-century, and one fragment of it is especially significant:
the small white lozenge set into the floor in front of the main entrance is