They're Ours! Hah.

I don’t know that I’ve ever remember looking up at a building and laughing aloud in quie that way before.  It was third time in the day when I finally understood just how the gesture had been rendered.  Laughing, I was but shaking my head as well at the gesticulated audacity of what they’d done and how it had been displayed. 

In the morning we had our first walk through the Piazza San Marco but we were late, and in a rush and it wasn’t appropriate to do much more than gape and stare around and move on through.  When I returned later, I was tired.  I’d been walking for hours and it being Venice, I’d taken many, many wrong turns.  Fortuitously I stumbled upon the place where you leave your bags before entering St. Marks.  A far, far better thing for sure to notice this now then be told of it after walking through a thirty minute line. 

I was suitably bowled over by the interior of St. Marks.  Here was mosaic work to honor the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.  Here where domes to speak to the Arab world.  This was a church without any seats.  At least there were none available.  Finally, I found a place to sit and rest off to the left, from an obscured entrance way.  That’s better. 

On the other side was the relics of St. Marks.  Stolen from Alexandria is 828 A.D. by two Venetian merchants.  One finds trade at every corner of this great city.  I probably shouldn’t say so but I found the fingers and bones and other body parts to be risible: preserving the body parts of Church figures, to imbue a spot with sanctity.  And on the way out there was a long queue up to see the museum.  I was just about out of time and so I opted not to head up but was determined to see the fabled horses which, were apparently up at the top.  There was a photo of them there, by the stairwell. 

Leaving the church, retrieving my bag I walked across the square and though pressed for time once again, I paused and looked back and there they were, the four Roman horses, staring down at the square.  So that’s where they have been placed.  And certainly it would be nice to head up and see them close, there they were, galloping up above the city.  I laughed audibly, uncontrollably, because it seemed such a remarkably defiant, arrogant, and dangerous gesture.  “They’re ours!  Hah.”  The modern mind would wonder at the legality and civility of looting for civic glory.  Not so our medieval Venetians.  "Deal with it!"

And one day, much later in the nineteenth century they were, of course, stolen once again, this time by Napoleon, who knew a thing or two about gesturing.  But they were returned, clearly, and here they are.   A middle finger in the face of Constantinople.  We are now on the scene.  The Adriatic is our lake and we'll take the Mediterranean while we're at it.  Doge Dandolo was blind but he knew all about symbolism, when he stole the Triumphal Quadriga and brought them home with him to the this courtyard here.  "We are the new empire on the scene.  Bring it on, if you dare."  What would the modern version of such behavior look like?  

Saturday, 03/18/17