The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis Read Free Book Online Page B

lately hung in the chapel of the pope in Rome, while Laocöon and Apollo had stood in the endless galleries of the Vatican. In the republic whose motto was “liberty, equality, fraternity,” the emblems of triumph were not slaves, nor piles of gold, nor martial trophies, but works of art, placed on display in a museum for the admiration of the people.
    An arch was erected opposite the Louvre in the Place du Carrousel. The four bronze horses who had led the triumph were provided with a bronze chariot, and then they were placed on top of the arch, in memory of the occasion.

     
    I T HAD ALL happened before: as the triumphant French well knew, the bronze horses had presided over triumphs in the capital city of another republic for nearly six hundred years. Every year on Ascension Day the doge would go from his palace to the basilica of San Marco, which was his chapel and the treasure house of his republic, to celebrate the triumph of Venice. He would kneel before the Pala d’Oro, an altarpiece studded with gems and glistering with gold, beneath which were buried the wonder-working relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist himself. Above the doge’s head hung five domes arranged in a Greek cross. They were covered in mosaics that, sparkling in the twilight, narrated the story of the republic and the saints and the angels that guarded it.
    Then the trumpets would sound, and the doge would emerge from the darkness of San Marco into the sunlit piazza outside. He would proceed down to the water between two granite columns, on top of which were mounted the two patrons of Venice: Saint Theodore standing on his crocodile and Saint Mark represented in the form of a winged lion. The doge would board his ceremonial barge, the
Bucintoro
; and he would sail through the lagoon and out to the open sea, where he would cast a golden ring into the water to reconsecrate the marriage of Venice to that element.
    Having consummated the union, the doge would return to San Marco and stand on a balcony over the basilica’s west doors. Above him were gilded kiosks crowded with countless carved saints; beneath, an arcade lined with sheets of precious green and red marble, set here and there with sculptures of Hercules and the caesars of old. And from the very heart of this facade, below the saints and above the basilica’s central door, rode forth the four bronze horses. Standing between them as if he were driving their chariot, the doge would review his citizens as they processed round and round the piazza below him. Dressed in a golden mantle and holding the insignia of his office, he was frozen in an attitude as rigid and regal as that of an oriental emperor.

     
    I T HAD ALL happened before, of course, or at least that’s what the Venetians told their new French masters in 1798. The four bronze horses—and the gem-studded icons of the Pala d’Oro and the winged lion—had presided over triumphs in the capital city of yet another republic for eight hundred years. On the anniversary of the foundation of that city, the emperor would open a door between the Sacred Palace and the Hippodrome; and with his train of
magistri
, proconsuls, senators, priests, and relics, he would appear in gorgeous array in the imperial box before the citizens of Constantinople.
    The Hippodrome was some fifteen hundred feet long, an elongated bowl of stone seats that, on those days, might be filled with a hundred thousand people. A raised barrier, the
spina
, ran down the middle of the Hippodrome, dividing it into two tracks. At one end the starting gates resembled a triumphal arch, while at the otherthe track was curved to allow racing chariots to wheel around an obelisk.
    The primary purpose of the Hippodrome was chariot racing, but it was more than a mere sporting arena. The Blues and Greens, which had started out as two different racing teams, had over time become powerful political factions that could bring the whole empire to its knees. The Milion, the pavilion from