Horses of Saint Mark

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Horses of Saint Mark have watched over Venice from the loggia of St Mark's Basilica for most of the last eight centuries. Four bronze horses, cast from a metal that is more than 96.67 percent copper, have survived sackings, sea voyages, and the courts of emperors. They were ripped from their perch by Napoleon in 1797, carried to Paris to crown a triumphal arch, and then returned to Venice after his final defeat. Their collars, which look like decoration, were actually fitted in 1204 to hide the scars left when the horses' heads were severed for transport. What are these statues, exactly? Where were they made, and for whom? And why did so many conquerors, across so many centuries, feel they had to have them?

• 2. A Mystery of Origins

  ›

  Scholars have never fully agreed on when these horses were made. Many date them to the 2nd or 3rd century AD, pointing to their resemblance to the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which was created around 175 AD. Others look at the naturalistic rendering of the animals and the evident technical precision of the casting and argue for Classical Greece, somewhere in the 5th or 4th centuries BC. That is a gap of several hundred years, and it has never been closed.

  Their proportions offer a clue about where they were meant to stand. The horses have short backs and notably long legs, a combination that reads oddly at eye level but resolves into something convincing when seen from below. Researchers have argued this means they were originally designed to sit above the viewer, possibly atop a triumphal arch or some comparable grand structure.

  One candidate for their original patron is the Emperor Septimius Severus, who may have commissioned them for Constantinople, the eastern capital. If that attribution is right, the horses were built for a city that did not yet exist when the older Greek dating would require them to have been made. The question of authorship and date remains genuinely open, and that uncertainty is part of what makes them so absorbing.

• 3. Constantinople and the Hippodrome

  ›

  For a long stretch of history, the horses stood at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, displayed as part of a quadriga, the four-horse chariot formation used in Roman triumphs and chariot racing. An 8th or early 9th century text called the Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai may refer to them directly, describing four gilt horses above the Hippodrome that came from the island of Chios under the Emperor Theodosius II.

  The Hippodrome was the social and sporting heart of Constantinople, capable of holding enormous crowds, and the quadriga was among its most prominent ornaments. For the horses to have stood there was to stand at the center of the Byzantine world. That position of prominence made them a prize worth taking when the opportunity arose.

  The opportunity came in 1204, when forces of the Fourth Crusade sacked the Byzantine capital. Venetian forces were central to that looting, and the horses were among the spoils they carried away. The practical problem of transport was solved bluntly: the heads of the horses were cut off so the statues could be broken down and moved. The collars fitted around their necks that same year were designed to hide exactly that damage, and they have been in place ever since.

• 4. Venice and Napoleon

  ›

  Doge Enrico Dandolo, who led the Venetian forces during the Fourth Crusade, sent the horses to Venice, and they were installed on the terrace of the façade of St Mark's Basilica in 1254. Petrarch, the great Italian poet, admired them there during his time in the city.

  They stood on that loggia for more than five centuries before Napoleon had them forcibly removed in 1797. He brought them to Paris, where they were incorporated into the design of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, paired with a quadriga in a configuration that echoed their earlier life at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. For Napoleon, possessing the horses was a statement about inheriting the prestige of ancient Rome and of Venetian power.

  That claim did not last. After Napoleon's final defeat, a British officer named Captain Dumaresq was selected by the Emperor of Austria to recover the horses and return them to Venice. Dumaresq had fought at the Battle of Waterloo and was present with the Coalition forces in Paris when the task was assigned to him. He took the horses down from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and returned them to St Mark's in 1815. The Emperor of Austria, pleased with how skillfully he had handled the work, gave Dumaresq a gold snuff box bearing the Emperor's initials in diamonds on the lid.

• 5. Survival and Conservation

  ›

  The horses remained on the loggia of St Mark's into the early 1980s, when air pollution had done enough damage to force a decision. They were removed from the exterior and moved inside the basilica, where they remain on display today. Replicas now stand in their former position on the loggia, visible from the piazza below.

  The composition of the statues explains part of why they survived so long outdoors. At more than 96.67 percent copper, they are not truly bronze in the conventional sense, since bronze requires a significant tin content. That low tin content pushed the casting temperature up to somewhere between 1200 and 1300 degrees Celsius, a demanding technical achievement for any era. The high copper content also affects how the surface weathers, giving the horses their distinctive appearance. The decision to bring the originals indoors was ultimately about protecting something that had already demonstrated a remarkable capacity to endure.