BOOK OF THE DAY: HELEN MEANYreviews Piazza San MarcoBy Iain Fenlon, Profile Books
IT HAS been called an open-air salon, the marketplace of the world, a stage set, but the most quoted description of the piazza San Marco in Venice is Napoleon’s “drawing room of Europe”.
To Balzac, it was a more intimate space, “a stock exchange, a theatre foyer, a reading room, a club and a confessional”. For those seeing it for the first time, the words of earlier travellers, historians, artists and writers tend to reverberate, inhibiting an original response.
Into this echo-chamber the cultural historian Iain Fenlon modestly steps: he knows he is treading on well-polished stones, but wants us to understand their significance.
A professor of the history of music at Cambridge, Fenlon absorbs centuries of scholarship with ease. This volume is in some ways an extension of his earlier, more illuminating work, The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice, and his interest seems to wane a little the farther he moves from the medieval and Renaissance periods, when the ceremonial life of piazza San Marco was self- consciously complex.
In these centuries, the power of the “most serene” republic was regularly celebrated in spectacular processions through the piazza: ritual public dramas of Church and state, charged with symbolism and elaborately arranged around the semi-sacral figure of the doge.
Fenlon sets out to place piazza San Marco at the core of Venice’s imperial history, as “the centre of an intricate web of religious and civic conceptions”. He unpicks those conceptions carefully, beginning with the foundation myth of the city, which connected it to both Byzantium and Rome, through the figure of St Mark.
He manages to give a lucid explanation of some murky material: how the relics of the saint were brought (stolen) from Alexandria to Venice by merchants in the ninth century and, through a cycle of legends and hagiographies, were incorporated into the official self-image of the republic as divinely ordained and protected.
The religious underpinnings of mercantile power were reinforced when Venice became the main embarkation point to the Holy Land. By the end of the 15th century, Venice’s fleet controlled most of the pilgrimage trade.
On the eve of departure, pilgrims were dazzled by the great Corpus Christi procession through the piazza, with candles that symbolised the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, making Venice, Fenton writes, “the new Jerusalem”.
The Byzantine influence in the early design of the piazza and the modelling of the Basilica of San Marco on the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople is emphasised here as a form of deliberate political positioning, as is the later Romanisation of the piazza in the 16th century by the city’s great architect, Sansovino.
At his best when interpreting the centrality of the piazza to the sophisticated propagandising of the republic, rather than dutifully examining its individual buildings, Fenlon whizzes through later centuries and the city’s decline.
Perhaps this should have been a shorter, focused essay, ending with the Austrian occupation rather than stretching into a survey for this “Wonders of the World” series.
Concluding with some predictable comments on the current state of piazza San Marco, where pigeons, tourists and advertising hoarding compete for dominance, he, like many Venetophiles, seems inclined to put other people off visiting – an appendix emphasises crowds and endless queues.
But these can be avoided: go in January, climb the steps of the empty basilica to the loggia, and survey the piazza in the glittering winter light. No longer a drawing room, perhaps, but the fascinating urban canvas it has been for a thousand years.
- Piazza San MarcoBy Iain Fenlon Profile Books 233pp, £15.99
Helen Meany is the editor of Irish Theatre Magazine