Based on a colloquium held in Baltimore in 2007, this book makes a major contribution to the scholarly literature on the church of San Marco in Venice.Footnote ¹ Perhaps the most Byzantine-style medieval building outside the Greek world, San Marco has often been studied through Byzantine spectacles, most notably in the seminal monographs of Otto Demus.Footnote ² Of course, there have been many studies of the church since Demus, most notably the four volumes published in 1997 following the nine-hundreth anniversary of the consecration of the present church in 1094.Footnote ³ This book generously acknowledges the foundations laid by Demus and others, but its range of interpretative strategies allows the accretions of myth and legend, as well as political and religious ideologies, to be incorporated into its more multivalent readings of works of art. Drawing on a vast range of literature in many languages, the authors of this volume free the subject from its insistent dependence on Byzantium. Moreover, they offer a useful analysis of the changing perspectives revealed in the historiography, from medieval chronicles onwards. From the point of view of ecclesiastical history, the book is particularly valuable in its discussions of the significance and display of relics and the interplay between sacred and secular themes in the iconography, especially in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Although both architecture and liturgy set the context, the book's central focus is directed towards aspects of the church's decoration by spolia, mosaic and sculpture.

From the outset the church had a dual function: as the burial place of the Apostle Mark, whose relics were brought from Alexandria in 828/9, and as the palatine chapel attached to the doge's palace. Because the dogeship was an elected office, the church served not as the private chapel for a dynastic head of state, but as the focus of elaborate civic ritual. Significantly, San Marco did not become the cathedral of Venice until 1807; before then the cathedral lay at San Pietro di Castello, seemingly cast adrift on the eastern tip of the city. As Michael Jacoff recognises in his essay on the façade, the obvious comparisons with cathedrals elsewhere in Italy have to be made cautiously, for San Marco was comparable in terms of splendour and civic identity, rather than ecclesiastical status. In her discussion of the Baptistery, Debra Pincus argues that San Marco also had a role as a parish church, but this must have been a conceptual designation addressed to the people of Venice in general rather than attached to a geographically defined ‘parish’, because the inhabitants of Piazza San Marco belonged to the nearby parishes of San Basso and San Geminiano.

Puzzles remain, and the editors have wisely not sought internal consistency when their authors offer diverging interpretations. One problem concerns the positions over time of the so-called Pilastri acritani, the beautiful carved piers in front of the south wall. Now known to have originated in the church of Hagios Polyeuktos in Constantinople, these piers were probably brought to Venice after the Fourth Crusade in 1204. As Robert Nelson recounts in his illuminating analysis of the legend's evolution, they acquired a completely new meaning as trophies of victory after the Venetian defeat of the Genoese at Acre in the 1250s. In Fabio Barry's plan of the Piazzetta in c. 1300 (fig. 1.1) the piers are placed on either side of the former Porta da Mar leading into the atrium, whereas Thomas Dale's plan of pilgrimage routes (figs 5.17, 5.19) shows them in their present location in front of the Baptistery. Holger Klein casts doubt on this bay as a former entrance to the Baptistery. In Jacopo de’ Barbari's woodcut of 1500 (plate i), dating from before the closing of the Porta da Mar, the Pilastri acritani appear to stand in their present position in front of the Baptistery, though without framing a portal. Another grey area is the early history of the icon of the Virgin and Child now known as the Nikopeia, placed in the north transept in 1617 after more than a century enshrined in the upper sacristy with other precious relics. The interpretations of Dale, Maguire and Nelson adopt different positions, but this icon apparently already held patriotic associations when ‘la Nostra Donna’ was displayed in the triumphal celebrations in 1517 after the recovery of Verona in the Cambrai wars.Footnote ⁴

The role of trophies and relics in the appearance and meaning of the church permeates the whole book. Fabio Barry's discursive essay places particular emphasis on the role of spolia, especially in public settings for punishment. Henry Maguire illustrates the shift from trophy to relic in his detailed analysis of the Aniketos relief in the Zen Chapel (formerly the vestibule of the Porta da Mar). Its Greek inscription commemorates the role of two individuals called Michael and Irene in providing a water supply, but in San Marco the icon acquired the status of a holy relic, supposedly a fragment of the rock from which Moses struck water. Developing a tentative suggestion by the present writer, Thomas Dale argues that the church came to represent Venice as a Holy City through the articulation of pilgrim routes through it. He adopts the concept of cultural hybridity, here seen to include both ‘Islamicate’ models and influences from Eastern Christianity such as Coptic Egypt. Adopting a reverse chronology from the dogeship of Andrea Dandolo to that of his earlier kinsman Enrico Dandolo, Holger Klein analyses the reworking of Byzantine artefacts such as the Pala d'Oro and the creation of Venetian settings for appropriated relics.

The political nuances of the church's decoration emerge especially vividly in Michael Jacoff's discussion of the façade. He suggests that the Porta Sant'Alipio mosaic portrays the doge among fellow patricians, while the Mestieri, the sculptures of tradesmen around the central portal, enhance the role of ordinary Venetians in the hierarchy of state. Noting the broad geographical horizons of the apostolic missions portrayed in one of the domes of the Baptistery, Debra Pincus remarks on their overlap with Venetian trade routes in the Levant.

A particularly eye-opening chapter by Liz James challenges Demus’ Byzantino-centric analysis of the mosaics. In broad terms, Demus attributed the higher quality workmanship to Byzantine craftsmen, and the rest to Venetians taught by Greek masters. By contrast, James finds little concrete evidence that Byzantine mosaicists were active in Venice and dismisses the notion that imported or pillaged glass tesserae were employed in San Marco. Instead, she argues, Venetian glass-making was sufficiently developed to provide the raw materials, and competent Italian mosaicists were active all over the peninsula by the twelfth century. She concludes that rivalry with Rome as an apostolic city rather than deference to Constantinople stimulated the art of mosaic in medieval Venice.

All the articles in this volume are original, inspiring and scholarly. They share a refreshingly broad frame of reference in both time and space and make a valuable contribution to the literature on this complex and remarkable church. The church's iconography was neither unified nor consistent, but over time its richness and flexibility allowed the expression of overlapping and constantly mutating ideologies.