Basilica di San Marco, Venice, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Basilica di San Marco, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Basilica di San Marco, Venice, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BB590A

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By the 1950s the Basilica di San Marco had been under intermittent restoration for roughly nine centuries, and the scaffolding pole visible against the central dome suggests that tradition was holding strong. The basilica was always a statement less about Christianity than about what Venice wanted you to understand about Venice — namely that the Republic had, over several hundred years, quietly relocated much of Byzantium's finest decorative work to this one facade, and considered this a form of diplomacy. The gilded mosaics above the arches and the four stolen bronze horses from Constantinople that normally crown the upper loggia made it the most glamorous act of organised looting in Western architectural history, a fact Venetians have never found awkward. A postwar tourist standing in the Piazza San Marco in the 1950s, guidebook in hand, would have been told to admire the Byzantine-Romanesque synthesis without being encouraged to dwell on the supply chain. The basilica looked then, as it does here, like a building that had won every argument it ever entered.

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